The PandaBuy Raid: Why It Happened, What Was Seized, and How the Cases Ended

PandaBuy's raid, dated from start to finish

The raid wasn't a single event but the end of an investigation that began months earlier, with a data breach landing in the same fortnight:

Sources at the foot of the page. The April 2024 statement and WTR report are dated from Know Your Meme's event timeline.

Two things stand out. The investigation had a British police unit involved from the start, which shows how far the brands' case reached beyond China. And the breach and the raid were unrelated events that happened to coincide, which made the first days confusing: many users thought the site was down because of hackers.

Verdict: The raid was the end of a months-long case, not a surprise inspection. There was no warning to customers.

What did police seize from PandaBuy?

Most of the detail comes from a single source written for the brand side: an April 24, 2024 article published by Managing IP as sponsored content from the investigators who supported the operation. Read it with that in mind. It says the Changning branch of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau led the operation with support from police in several provinces, and lists:

• over 200,000 pairs of trainers, with branded footwear making up over 90% of the seizure;
• millions of pre-packed parcels covering products of more than 200 brands;
• RMB 230 million in frozen assets;
• 40 key suspects placed under criminal coercive measures, with more expected;
• a warehouse footprint of over 100,000 square metres in Huizhou and more than 2,200 staff across 20-plus cities.

The same article attributes RMB 39.6 billion of 2023 revenue to PandaBuy. We repeat it only because it's widely quoted; no independent figure exists, and it is the brands' number, not PandaBuy's. Wikipedia's summary gives a slightly different picture of the raid, with over 200 police and about 50 private investigators involved and the company's Hangzhou base among the sites searched.

Verdict: The seizure figures are large and come from the brands' side. The court outcome is the more reliable record, and it's thinner.

How did the court cases end?

Two legal tracks ran at once, and they ended differently.

In New York, King Spider LLC v. Panda (Hong Kong) Technology Co. (case 1:24-cv-02668) was filed in April 2024 by six labels including SP5DER, Off-White, Denim Tears, Palace, Loewe and Rhude. They won an early order freezing more than $16 million. On January 14, 2025 Judge Jessica Clarke dissolved it, finding the brands hadn't shown they were likely to win: PandaBuy, she wrote, appeared 'to only act as a valet between third-party e-commerce websites and the end user'. A request to restore the freeze pending appeal was refused the next day, and an appeal was docketed at the Second Circuit as 25-137; we couldn't find a published result.

In China, the raid was a criminal matter, and the 'valet' argument didn't help there. Wikipedia records a verdict in April 2026 and the website being taken offline, but we couldn't locate the judgment, so sentences and amounts aren't something we can report.

The contrast matters for anyone choosing an agent now. US civil courts have been reluctant to treat an agent as the seller, but Chinese authorities can act against one directly, and that's where the risk to customers' parcels and balances comes from.

Verdict: PandaBuy won the US civil round and still closed. The legal risk that ended it applies to agents in China generally.

What happened to PandaBuy customers' parcels and money?

For customers the raid meant three losses at once:

• Parcels in the warehouse were sealed with the rest of the stock. We found no account of customers getting them released.
• Wallet balances were frozen with the company; CNBuyPilot found bank, crypto and gift-card recoveries were essentially nil.
• Parcels already shipped were outside the warehouses, so their fate rested with the carrier and customs in the buyer's country rather than with PandaBuy.

The habits that would have limited those losses are the same ones that matter today: ship hauls promptly, don't park money in an agent's wallet, and keep the original Weidian or Taobao links rather than the agent's. Those links are why an old PandaBuy spreadsheet is still worth converting; the PandaBuy link converter does that, and the status board lists the 23 agents open at our last check.

For the question we're asked most since the raid, whether PandaBuy might return, see is PandaBuy back.

Verdict: Customers lost what was inside PandaBuy at the moment of the raid. Nothing kept outside it, including the links, was lost.