Featuring Bill Ryan of the Ryan Investigative Group via the New York Post

Knockoff-purse hawkers are sporting a new bag — of tricks.

The dealers in Chinatown are stepping up their game by peddling purses out of apartments, using digital brochures to tout their wares and even migrating to Midtown to avoid investigators.

But a retired NYPD detective is hot on their trail.

Bill Ryan, now a private investigator working for several designers, said he’s seen the crafty hawkers, hip to increased law enforcement, move out of shop back rooms on Canal Street and into private residences nearby — sometimes paying tenants’ rent in exchange for storing piles of purses in closets and kitchens.

“You walk into a normal kitchen, and it’s full of $2 boxes of Corn Flakes, but you walk into a kitchen in Chinatown, and it’s full of [fake] $2,000 [bags],” said Ryan, 51, head of the Ryan Investigative Group.

He said the sellers also show customers digital photos of bags, then commission bike-delivery workers to fetch them.

They sell bags out of vans and on the street in Midtown, too, he said.

Ryan, who worked as a narcotics cop in Brooklyn North, said the sellers in Chinatown have evolved.

“We keep building better mousetraps, and the mouse keeps getting smarter,” Ryan said.

On an undercover ride-along with Ryan last week, The Post witnessed two female hawkers in their early 20s showing customers a digital brochure of knockoff purses on a smartphone in a small T-shirt shop on Canal Street.

Designers were listed on the phone as if they were contacts. When a seller tapped the name, a photo of a knockoff popped up.

A female undercover investigator working for Ryan then handed over cash, prompting a worker to leave for 10 minutes before returning with a bag wrapped in plastic.

In a second deal, a seller met undercover investigators near Centre Street and guided them to a tenement where an elderly resident did the dealing.

Dozens of handbags occupied whole rooms in her home. Shelves full of the purses, organized by “designer,” lined the kitchen walls. There were no tables or chairs.

Ryan and his investigators are collecting evidence to build a case to stop the racket just as new legislation threatens to punish people who buy the knockoffs.

Those who buy counterfeit goods probably don’t realize the harm they’re causing, Ryan said.

“These bags are made by child labor and involve terrorism and organized crime. That’s a high price for a fake bag,” he said.