Eastern’s campus is quite a paradox. The last time I had seen so many Chanel quilted Cambon purses, Louis Vuitton monogrammed canvas Speedy bags and golden Coach totes was in the fall fashion issue of Harper’s Bazaar. For a town in a county with a shockingly high poverty level of 14.4 percent and a median family household income of only $45,708, Charleston has quite a bit of bling.

It’s safe to say most students boasting these bags are flaunting fakes. The average Louis Vuitton bag retails more than $600, and Chanel prices rarely sink below $1,500 – cash that most students (and parents) don’t want to fork over.

And why would you, when you have myriad options of visually identical designer options online, at purse parties and on dark city streets – all of which are more accessible and more affordable than a trip to Michigan Avenue.

Faking it is more fashionable than ever. Can we even tell the difference between a counterfeit item and the real thing? Even Nike, Abercrombie & Fitch and The North Face are faked – few shoppers are savvy to it because it all seems the same, at least to the untrained eye.

We consumers need to look a little deeper into our purchases. Counterfeiting is illegal not because the money-hungry, superficial European designers want to rip us off and force-feed us millions of dollars worth of Gucci – it is illegal because it is unethical.

Not only is a purchase of a fake item stealing the designer’s personal, innovative, copyrighted creation, but it is also promoting some of the most hideous practices in the clothing industry.

In the book “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas says the counterfeiters of the world are doing more than mass-producing fake goods: they’re also exploiting and selling children – and funding terrorists.

A counterfeit investigator Thomas interviewed said he witnessed a plant in Thailand churning out counterfeit leather handbags by children under 10, all lined up on the floor. The owners had “broken the children’s legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh, so the bones wouldn’t mend.” The owner said he did it because the children said they wanted to go play.

Selling children in China for cheap labor work provided by counterfeit assembly plants is not an uncommon practice. They are said to earn as little as $12 a week in these factories.

Thomas reports that the FBI believes terrorists financed the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 in part with counterfeit T-shirt sales. The week after Sept. 11, 2001, 1,500 counterfeiting vendor stalls in South America, some reportedly owned by al-Qaeda, shut down. An Interpol officer said North African radical fundamentalist groups in al-Qaeda and Hezbollah all receive income from counterfeiting.

Maybe we do not want to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on a single designer piece when a nearly identical option is available for 75 percent of that price.

Yes, if we choose the ethical option, our wallets will be a lot lighter.

But so will our consciences.