Knockoff: a local browser extension that filters Amazon's fake pseudo-brands

Knockoff is a free browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that strips trademark-squat pseudo-brands—think ALL-CAPS gibberish names like SZHLUX or HORUSDY—out of Amazon search results, leaving established brands that have a reputation to protect. It works across every Amazon marketplace and requires no account. All the appraisal happens locally in the browser: each listing is checked against a curated register of 5,000-plus real brands refreshed daily, and any unknown name is scored against the linguistic fingerprint of squat-brands (short unpronounceable strings, missing vowels, long consonant runs). The only network call is that daily brand-list refresh, so there’s no tracking, analytics, or cloud lookups tied to your browsing.

Users control how aggressive the filter is. Three strictness levels—Relaxed, Standard, and Strict—decide whether flagged items are hidden, dimmed, or merely tagged with a warning, and every verdict can be overridden with one click. Personal trust and block lists take priority over the extension’s own scoring, and an optional toggle also removes Amazon’s paid “Sponsored” listings. Misclassifications can be reported from inside the extension; those reports feed a curated list that propagates to every install within a day, no formal update needed.

The project leans hard into transparency and community maintenance. It’s released under a fair-source license (FSL-1.1-MIT) that converts to MIT after two years, has no build step, and keeps its brand lists as plain text files—so correcting a bad classification is a one-line pull request. The framing is that the fight against junk brands is an arms race only winnable collectively, with users contributing brands, tuning heuristics, and flagging errors that then ship to everyone.