A certification mark is only as strong as the vigilance behind it. At TÜV AUSTRIA Belgium, our OKcert team spends the year tracking how certified products actually perform on the market, verifying products which carry our logo still matches what our engineers assessed, and acting swiftly whenever it doesn’t.
Today, we are publishing our first edition of the monitoring overview for 2025, giving customers, partners and the wider industry a more transparent look at how that surveillance works and what it found.
Over the past year, our monitoring network (spanning partners in more than 20 countries, clients, customs and police authorities, alert citizens, and continuous digital surveillance of websites, marketplaces and social media) reviewed products and communications across the market. The result: 137 nonconformities identified and addressed, ranging from administrative corrections to major cases requiring certificate suspension and product recall.
Digital monitoring proved just as important as physical sampling. Working with our BrandIT/Swoop platform, we reviewed 278 cases, primarily on Amazon, resulting in takedown requests, corrective actions and ongoing investigations. Where conformity marks were used fraudulently, cases were escalated to our Legal Department and added to our public blacklist.
This is a level of detail we don’t typically put in front of the public but we believe it matters. Certification is a promise, and the only way to keep that promise credible is to show, concretely, how it’s enforced. Publishing this overview is our way of holding ourselves to the same standard of transparency we ask of everyone who carries an OKcert mark.
The full Yearly Monitoring Overview 2025, including detailed statistics and case examples, is available for download here.
