EU fines AliExpress record €550M for allowing illegal and dangerous products

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BRUSSELS — The European Commission slapped Chinese e-commerce giant AliExpress with a record €550 million fine on Monday for failing to stop the sale of illegal and harmful products on its platform.

“There were a lot of counterfeit products, unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics which stayed online for a very long time,” the EU’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters ahead of the announcement. “Products were still being recommended and advertised on the platform … even after it was already known that they did not meet the standards.”

The penalty is the biggest ever imposed by the EU executive under the bloc’s rulebook policing online platforms, the Digital Services Act, which requires very large platforms, including AliExpress — owned by China’s tech giant Alibaba — to assess and mitigate the risks associated with the spread of illegal content and goods on their systems.

The finding that AliExpress failed to check and tackle these risks “is very dangerous for our consumers, but it’s also unfair for those companies that are complying with all our rules,” Virkkunen said.

The record fine is the third one imposed under the Digital Services Act so far. It comes two months after Brussels hit rival marketplace Temu with a €200 million bill over similar breaches. “We were looking at the duration and the seriousness of these failures when deciding the size of the fine,” Virkkunen said, recalling that Temu had so far only been sanctioned for failing to check its service for illegal products sold in Europe properly.

The Commission opened a probe into AliExpress in March 2024 over suspected breaches of the DSA, including also on the platform’s transparency on advertising and recommender systems. Many of these suspected breaches were already settled in a series of commitments in June 2025.

In its new findings, the EU assessed that AliExpress failed to “evaluate whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products,” leading to “overcharged” moderators having “only like 10 or 20 seconds to review the illegal product,” a senior Commission official said in a briefing ahead of the announcement. It also failed to assess how its recommender and advertising systems “exacerbate” the spread of illegal products and relied on compliance checks that “could easily be circumvented through mis-categorization.”

AliExpress has until Oct. 20 to come up with an “action plan” to address the infringements, which lasted at least until June 2025, or face additional penalties.

AliExpress did not respond to POLITICO’s request for a comment.