What Happened to Daban Model? The Raid, the Molds That Survived, and the Brand That Never Died

In August 2018, Chinese police raided Daban Model's factory in Shantou, Guangdong. They seized 56,000 kits, locked down 28 steel injection molds, and arrested nine people. Hobby forums declared it was over. Blog posts ran headlines like "End of Daban" and "Daban Shutdown - Official."

But is it?

About a year and a half later, kits started showing up again - same runners, same tolerances, same quirks - just in plain black boxes with no logo on the front. The molds were never destroyed. The factory staff never scattered. The person running the operation received a suspended sentence and never spent a day in prison.

The Name Kept Changing. The Factory Didn't.

To understand Daban, you have to understand that it's not a company that appeared out of nowhere. It's the third name for an operation that's been running since the early 2000s.

The origin is Shantou, Guangdong province - China's toy manufacturing capital. A company called TT Hongli (TT泓利) started producing knockoff Gundam kits there in the early 2000s. The kits were rough. Hobbyists called them "meat grade" (肉高) - blurry panel lines, chronic shrinkage, parts that needed genuine force to assemble. But they were cheap, and they covered HG, MG, and PG scales. For a lot of Chinese builders, this was the entry point.

In 2009, Bandai issued a serious copyright warning. TT Hongli responded by doing what it would do twice more: changing the name. The brand became GaoGao (高高), often written as GG. Same factory, same molds, same people. Quality improved slightly, but the fundamental product - unauthorized reproductions of Bandai kits at a fraction of the price - didn't change.

By 2012, Bandai came knocking again. Same playbook: another rebrand. This time the name was Daban (大班), and this time the ambitions were bigger.

Daban at Peak: 2012-2018

Daban positioned itself as the premium bootleg. Where GaoGao had been content to produce rough copies at rock-bottom prices, Daban aimed higher - maybe 80% of Bandai quality at a third of the cost. And they organized. The product line split into two numbering systems that became instantly recognizable to anyone shopping for KO kits:

The 66 series (66XX) covered standard MG reproductions - straight copies of Bandai's catalog with minor modifications to avoid the most obvious legal triggers, like removing the word "Gundam" and replacing it with "Fighter." The 88 series (88XX) was where things got interesting. These were modified, refined, or "Metal Build style" kits - reproductions that added alloy frames, enhanced detail, or copied Bandai's premium finished-product lines that had never been released as model kits. The 88 line was Daban's reputation builder.

Between 2015 and 2017, Daban and Dragon Momoko split the Chinese bootleg market roughly between them. Both were copying Bandai designs, but with different priorities. Dragon Momoko focused on adding detail - sharper panel lines, undergated runners, surface enhancements beyond what the Bandai originals offered. Daban focused on mold accuracy - getting as close to the original Bandai engineering as possible. The forums were full of "Daban vs Dragon Momoko" threads, and both brands had passionate defenders.

August 16, 2018: Four Locations, One Morning

In September 2017, Shanghai police raided Dragon Momoko's factory in Shantou, seized over 3,500 kits and production molds, and detained the CEO. The message was as clear as a neon sign in a dark alley. Daban, to everyone's surprise, either read the sign like a vacancy sign or missed it by a million miles. They expanded - more products, wider distribution, more visibility. They were copying Bandai's most expensive PG and Metal Build lines.

In July 2018, Shanghai Changning police received a formal complaint from Bandai identifying 28 specific Daban kits as direct copies of copyrighted Bandai products. A task force was assembled. They spent weeks mapping the entire supply chain - not just the factory, but the packaging operation, the warehouses, the distribution network.

On the morning of August 16, 2018, police moved simultaneously on four locations across two provinces:

The production factory in Shantou, Guangdong - over 2,000 square meters, multiple injection molding machines, and a dedicated mold storage room housing 28 steel molds. A packaging facility in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, where runners were sorted, boxed, and sealed for shipping. Primary distribution warehouses in Guangzhou and Cangnan (Zhejiang province), which fed both brick-and-mortar retailers and Taobao e-commerce shops across China.

All nine core suspects were detained on the spot. Police seized 56,000 boxed kits, along with production equipment, packaging materials, financial records, computer hard drives, and sales data. The total case value was assessed at 230 million yuan - roughly $33 million USD at the time.

The 28 steel injection molds - the actual means of production, each one capable of producing tens of thousands of kits - were counted, cataloged, and sealed with police evidence tags. They were not transported to an evidence facility. They were not destroyed. They stayed on-site.

The Sentence: Nine Months, Suspended

The case went to trial in 2019. Daban's actual controller was convicted of copyright infringement and sentenced to nine months imprisonment, suspended for one year, with a fine of 30,000 yuan - roughly $4,300 USD. Two other key figures received similar outcomes. The remaining six defendants received partial suspended sentences or were handled separately. None of the nine served actual prison time. By any measure, it was a slap on the wrist.

Why so light? Three factors.

Daban cooperated from day one - full confession, full compliance, no public resistance. Dragon Momoko's leadership had contested the charges and fought the investigation. Chinese courts weigh cooperation heavily in sentencing.

Bandai's own priorities appear to have been narrower this time. With Dragon Momoko, Bandai wanted total destruction - the brand erased, the molds physically cut apart. With Daban, Bandai never issued a comparable public statement. What that silence means is open to interpretation.

And Shantou is one of China's most important toy manufacturing clusters. Daban's operation generated significant tax revenue and employment across a supply chain that extended into packaging, logistics, and retail in multiple provinces. Local government had a direct interest in protecting that revenue stream, even if the brand had to disappear.

This was nothing but a slap on the wrist punishment and opened the door to a lot of conspiracy theories. Whether those theories turned into rabbit holes or not, the aftermath did lead into what's shaping the KO market today.

Why the Molds Survived

Remember those 28 molds that stayed on-site?

When Dragon Momoko was shut down, Bandai demanded - and Chinese police executed - physical destruction of every mold. Workers cut through the steel with welding torches and angle grinders. The molds were rendered permanently unusable. There was no ambiguity. There was no coming back.

Daban's 28 molds were sealed in place with police evidence tags. That's it. No destruction order was issued. No fixed term for the seal was recorded in any public court document. The molds were classified as evidence under an open-ended preservation order - and then, functionally, everyone moved on.

The molds never left the factory. They were never transported to a police evidence warehouse. They were never placed under ongoing guard. The original factory staff - the people who knew every mold, every machine, every production parameter - remained in the area. Once the case was adjudicated, the fines paid, and the suspended sentences recorded, the evidence seals aged and attention moved on.

Was this accidental? The physical evidence says no. Kits that appeared in 2020 and 2021 under new product lines - the Jiang (匠) series alloy-frame kits, the Tiegu (铁骨) series, updated versions of classic 88-series products - share identical runner gate positions, the same characteristic shrinkage patterns, and the same tolerance quirks as pre-raid Daban kits. You can't replicate those details with new molds. These are the same steel tools, producing the same parts, in the same factory.

The timeline tells the story: 2018 raid and seizure. 2019 trial and sentencing. Late 2019 to early 2020, small test batches start surfacing. By 2020, full production is back online. By 2021, new premium product lines are launching. That's not a bootleg operation rebuilding from scratch. That's a factory resuming a planned production schedule after a mandatory pause.

Bandai's public response reinforced the pattern. After the Dragon Momoko verdict, Bandai issued a formal announcement - naming the brand, detailing the charges, confirming mold destruction. Dragon Momoko was made an example of. For Daban, almost nothing. No dedicated announcement, no public accounting of the mold disposition. The DABAN brand was erased from open commerce, and nobody was forced to make public commitments about what happened to the molds.

The Brand That Never Died

GaoGao - the mid-2000s rebrand that predated Daban - was never named by Bandai. It never stopped producing.

GaoGao operated as the low-end product line of the same manufacturing operation - cheaper HG and older MG kits at bottom-tier pricing. During and after the raid, it provided continuous cash flow, an employed workforce, and an operating factory. It kept the lights on while the Daban brand went dark.

When production resumed, the DABAN logo was gone. In its place: plain black boxes with nothing but a product number in large white text. No brand name. No box art. Over time, as enforcement pressure eased, some color packaging returned, but the days of bold DABAN branding on every box were over.

The product lines continued to evolve. The Jiang (匠) series introduced alloy-frame kits copying Bandai's Metal Build finished products - a premium tier that hadn't existed before the raid. The Tiegu (铁骨) series offered reinforced frame versions of classic designs. Updated re-releases of popular 88-series kits continued to appear. New mold modifications - not entirely new kits, but meaningful revisions to existing ones - showed up as recently as 2025.

The distribution shifted too. Taobao shops that had openly listed "Daban" products were shut down. In their place: Pinduoduo became the primary open marketplace, where enforcement is lighter. Xianyu (China's secondhand marketplace) and WeChat private groups handled limited and vintage stock. Overseas, Southeast Asian hobby shops continued to stock Daban kits through established import channels, barely interrupted.

The Golden Unicorn

In September 2019, Bandai Namco sent the Shanghai police department a thank-you gift for the enforcement actions: a one-and-only, gold chrome-plated 1/48 Mega Size Unicorn Gundam in Awakening mode. Bandai dispatched a technician from Japan to assemble it on-site at the Huangpu district police headquarters. The build was completed on September 2nd. Everyone was satisfied.

On September 6th, the Shanghai police posted photos to their official Weibo account. Hobby builders in the comments spotted it immediately - the left and right leg armor panels were swapped. Neither the Bandai technician nor anyone at the police department had noticed. It took hobbyists looking at a Weibo photo to catch the error on a kit built by Bandai's own staff.

Two days later, The Paper (澎湃新闻) confirmed the error. Police called it a rushed mistake. Bandai sent someone back to fix it. The kit now sits in the Huangpu police department's honor room in its corrected form.

Same Story, Different Ending

The Dragon Momoko story and the Daban story start the same way: a Chinese manufacturer copies Bandai's intellectual property at industrial scale, gets caught, and faces legal consequences. But the endings are completely different.

Dragon Momoko resisted, lost, and was obliterated out of existence. Daban was the biggest Gundam counterfeit operation ever raided, but received only a "pause".

The Dragon Momoko team eventually resurfaced as HeMoXian, building original-IP mecha kits, while Daban is still operating in the shadow and never ceased to exist.

If you're looking for the other side of this story - what happened after the KO era, and the original-IP brands now designing their own mecha kits from scratch - our Dragon Momoko article covers that history, and our guide to third-party mecha kit brands covers who's who today.