How Many Times Is Shein Sued Right Now? PFAS at 3,300x the EU Limit, RICO Copyright Claims, and a Data Sharing Probe

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed what he described as the fifth lawsuit in four days on February 20, 2026, against businesses he said were connected to or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. Shein was the target. The company’s products were referred to in court documents in Collin County District Court as “silent carriers of poison”—a rhetorically charged term that can be linked to particular scientific findings. In late 2025, Greenpeace Germany released research showing that Shein jackets contained PFAS amounts up to 3,300 times the EU safety level.

South Korean regulatory testing cited in the lawsuit found phthalate levels in some children’s shoes and accessories at 428 times the legal limit. Children’s clothes were found to contain formaldehyde. Accessories contained lead. Shein, which became well-known for selling $8 dresses and $12 jeans with next-day processing using algorithmic trend analysis and Chinese production, now needs to clarify the contents of those items.

There are two concurrent tracks in the Texas complaint. The product safety claims are precise and based on laboratory findings. Although somewhat disputed, the data privacy allegations are still quite significant. According to the lawsuit, Shein functions as a data siphon, gathering comprehensive consumer data via its app and online store without providing sufficient notice that the Chinese government may be able to obtain this information in accordance with Chinese legislation.

A formal public service alert was released on March 31, 2026, by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which particularly warned that Chinese-operated apps hosted on Chinese servers are legally required to provide user data to the Chinese government upon request. The timing was not accidental.

Shein’s app has been widely downloaded in the United States, and its data collection practices — which at various points have included requesting access to data from other apps in exchange for discounts — have been scrutinised for years. Following a 2022 breach that exposed credit card and personal data from about 40 million accounts, New York State penalized the corporation $1.9 million. Not just for the breach itself, but also for inappropriate disclosure of the incident, there was a fine.

Shein is navigating a third regulatory jurisdiction as a result of the European Commission’s probe under the Digital Services Act. The EU probe, opened separately from the Texas action, targets the sale of illegal and dangerous products on Shein’s platform and the gamified, algorithmically driven purchase mechanics that critics argue are designed to create compulsive buying behaviour rather than merely facilitate it. The DSA gives the Commission meaningful enforcement tools, and a finding against Shein under that framework could carry significant penalties and operational restrictions in the European market.

The copyright and RICO litigation is a different category of problem. Multiple federal class action lawsuits, including cases involving Brandy Melville and numerous independent designers, allege that Shein’s design reproduction is not accidental or marginal but systematic — invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to argue that the infringement constitutes an organised scheme rather than a series of isolated violations.

RICO claims are difficult to sustain and courts do not certify them easily, but multiple cases have survived dismissal motions, which means the underlying allegations have been found sufficiently specific to warrant discovery and potentially trial. Meanwhile, the legal war with Temu has its own escalating dynamic — both companies have sued each other for copyright infringement, Temu has accused Shein of “mafia-style intimidation” of shared suppliers, and Temu’s own spokesperson described Shein’s copyright claims as audacious given Shein’s litigation exposure on the identical issue.

It’s hard not to notice that the accumulation of legal action across product safety, data privacy, intellectual property, competition, and deceptive marketing amounts to a fairly comprehensive challenge to almost every aspect of how the company operates. These cases run in parallel, proceed at different speeds, and are being argued in different jurisdictions — Texas state court, U.S. federal courts, and the European Commission — by plaintiffs with different goals. Whether any single one of them produces an outcome that meaningfully changes Shein’s practices is still genuinely unclear. The $8 dress is still on the site. The lawsuits are still in their early stages.