Episode 5 Fake Britain

Welcome to a world where nothing is quite as it seems.

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Get down! Get down!

-Put him on the floor!

Put your hands behind your back, now!

It's just an ordinary house, it could be anywhere in the country

but this is the Fake Britain house and it's filled with fakes.

You may not know it, but your home could be too.

In this series, we'll be investigating the criminals

trying to get their hands on your cash by using fraud,

forgeries and fakery.

And I'll be showing you how you can avoid being taken for a ride.

On today's show,

hunting down the serious criminals behind Britain's fakes.

You, son, nicked!

Doesn't look right, does it?

Especially being in a lock-up like this.

Is that job you're applying for real?

We hear from the man who almost lost it all

when his perfect job turned out to be a fake.

Fake computer hard drives that could cost you your data and your money.

Two hefty nuts and bolts, I've been duped in a big way.

And the flaming truth about fake hairdryers.

If this was someone's house then it could do considerable damage.

If you're looking for a job and see an advert that seems interesting,

you'll probably ask yourself a few questions.

"Have I got the right experience, qualifications or skills?"

But perhaps you should also be asking yourself, "Is it real?

"Could it be a fake?"

As our next story shows, there are fake job adverts out there and

far from helping you to earn a living,

they could end up leaving you penniless.

No-one knows better than Frank Tutty and Adrian Harris

at the National Crime Agency just how fakers can exploit

innocent job-seekers.

They've just foiled one of the biggest ever cases of job fakery.

It all started when London's well known department store Harrods

contacted the Metropolitan Police with a tip-off about some

suspicious sounding job adverts.

Basically Harrods had received a number of complaints

from people who'd applied for jobs at their retail store.

When the job-seekers had contacted Harrods,

Harrods were bemused by what they were saying.

They'd never advertised.

So Harrods didn't know anything about the jobs or the adverts,

which they traced back to the online classified ad site Gumtree.

Here's the thing - to the innocent job-seeker,

the adverts looked legitimate.

For example, you've got here IT support technician.

You've got Harrods sales assistant, you've got airport security officer.

So there's a wide variety of jobs that these people were advertised.

They would click on the job application

and what they would get back is,

they would get a response to their e-mail.

It was from somebody called Frank Jones

and it's in reply to their job advertisement.

So anyone that applied for these jobs was sent an e-mail

that appeared to be from a member of the recruitment team at Harrods.

It contained a link to download an application form.

It's the usual procedure.

Now, for anybody who would have been looking at this,

they would see Harrods

so they would automatically assume that this was a legitimate e-mail,

sent by somebody from Harrods in relation to the job application that

they've seen on Gumtree, that they've replied to.

However, what was odd was that all the job-seekers

ran into the same problem.

The application form wouldn't load.

Little did they know, they'd just fallen for a fake job.

What they were actually doing is they're infecting their computer

with a piece of malware.

Malware is a type of computer virus that can be concealed

within a download link.

Once infected, it gives criminals a porthole into your computer.

They can spy on what you're doing.

And then the next time you try to navigate to a bank site,

a pop-up will come up.

This is a fake login screen

but it looks identical to the real login screen.

In this case, this example is HSBC but it could be Lloyds,

it could be NatWest, it could be Nationwide, etc.

You'd enter your banking details,

those details would then be sent off to a drop e-mail address where the

criminals would then go and have a look and fish out your details.

So instead of applying for a job, they'd just unwittingly given

the fraudsters unrestricted access to their bank accounts.

This was cyber fakery at its most advanced

and could be pocketing the criminals

stacks of innocent job-seekers' cash.

Frank teamed up with Adrian Harris to hunt down the fakers.

They found that 422 different fake jobs,

supposedly from big-name employers, such as Argos and Nike,

had been posted on Gumtree and other recruitment sites.

Adrian and Frank traced the fake job postings

to a number of residential addresses in London.

Once we'd secured that information, we were able to obtain

search warrants to go and search the addresses.

Within those addresses we obviously seized a number of electrical items,

computers, phones, thumb drives, etc, for analysis.

One of the devices, we found at least 80 compromised bank accounts.

Also another device we came across,

at least 56,000 compromised e-mail accounts.

And using these stolen bank details, the fraudsters were then using

another level of fakery in order to get their hands on

innocent job-seekers' money.

They were phoning up the banks, pretending to be that person.

They were answering the security questions

and then they were asking for a new bank card

and a new pin number to be sent to a certain address,

saying that they'd moved.

But hold on, there's a problem with that.

The address might belong to someone else - me or you.

Well, the gang didn't care.

One of the members would hang around near the property

and pose as the homeowner.

They'd then approach the postman,

faking it that they lived there, in order to intercept the mail

and steal the new bank cards they'd just ordered.

And then they would go and abuse the credit card.

Evidence showed the group had made more than £300,000 from their fraud

but police believe this figure could be much higher -

possibly over one million and, of course, they were taking this

money from people who, on the whole, were in no position to lose it.

They exploited people's vulnerability.

If you were a job-seeker,

you'd either not had a job for a long time or you wanted to

change your job and the longer that that situation goes on,

the more vulnerable you become.

For the initial person who loses the money,

these can be very traumatic or worrying times.

They don't know how they're going to get their money back

or even if they WILL get their money back.

You know, people do lose money, it does cost us all money.

The victims have been affected and it affects an awful lot of people.

But while the fakers may have got one over on hundreds of people

who hunted for jobs, the NCA was a different matter.

Frank and Adrian pieced together the information

extracted from the seized hard drives and mobile phones

and arrested seven suspected fraudsters.

During the course of the inquiry,

we identified the following individuals.

This man, 20-year-old Tyrone Ellis, was the coder

who produced the fake adverts

and wrote the programs to steal the job-seekers' bank details.

He became one of the first British financial malware writers

to be convicted for targeting banks, but he made one little mistake

that helped Frank and Adrian to crack the case.

One of the reasons why we knew it was this gang that did it,

one of the login pages, as you can see here,

there's a typographical error.

You've got the word "loggin", it's spelt incorrectly.

On a normal banking web page, that wouldn't have happened.

A small and costly mistake,

but it wasn't the only rookie error

the fake job fraudsters made.

They've kept a scrapbook of their spending sprees using funds

stolen from the job-seekers

and it put Frank and Adrian firmly in the driving seat.

You can see they're sitting in high valued motor vehicles,

posing outside with Lamborghinis and, probably one of the best shots

that we've got, he's displaying two Rolex watches on his wrists.

It just goes to show you what these people were actually

spending their money on.

The upper echelon of this gang were, in my view, professional criminals.

That's what they did for a living.

The money wasn't a personal attack, it was an entirely professional,

business enterprise for them.

And it was an enterprise that came to an abrupt end.

The seven were all convicted on various counts of fraud

and given a total of

27 years behind bars.

The vulnerability of somebody wanting a job

is what they exploited.

To quote the judge, "This is not a victimless crime."

These cases are beginning to change people's attitudes as to

how this type of crime is viewed.

Later on, we'll meet a man who lost his money and his pride

when he was offered a fake job.

All these clothes carry well-known designer labels

and they're all fake.

It's the sort of stuff most of us know is sold on some market stalls

right across the country, but to get these clothes into markets

needs extensive organisation by the criminals.

Especially since the value of the goods often runs into millions.

It's that organisation that's being targeted by Trading Standards

and the police and Fake Britain went with them on a recent operation.

3am. Trading Standards HQ.

Today we're going to do an enforcement exercise.

Everything we've done in the last 12 months has led us to today.

Mark Wilson is heading up an intelligence-led operation.

They're targeted a group they believe are using a legitimate

self-storage firm in order to stash fake goods

destined for markets all over the South East.

If people start playing up, kicking off, I want them floored

and I want them out the way, cuffed and gone.

43 officers including Trading Standards, Scambusters and the

police from nine local authorities are heading to the storage unit.

The aim this morning is to intercept a number of groups of market traders

who have identified an area where they can make quite a bit of profit.

The aim this morning is obviously working with the police here,

is to arrest them as they arrive.

-We're in!

-We're in.

Now inside the storage unit, the team gets into position

for the sting operation.

The officers will sit tight for the market traders to arrive.

Before long, the team hears voices

and engines running outside the lock-up.

There's no telling how the traders will react.

They're now poised to strike.

SHOUTING

Police! Police! Get out the car.

All right. You, son, nicked!

-OK?

-All right.

Concerning the supply of counterfeit goods.

What's up now, then?

Right! You were asked to be quiet, weren't you?

'The short and sharp tactics used by the police have

'paid off as they apprehend six traders.'

Keys and mobile phones are seized and any vital information

the phones may contain will be extracted and used as evidence.

If the men have been found to have sold fake goods,

it could land these traders up to two years in prison.

With the suspects in handcuffs, it's time for Duncan Lamp

and his team to start the hunt for fakes.

We'll go across all of the containers, looking over the top.

If we find anything, we'll make a note of the number on the door

and then we'll crop the bolt and have a look properly.

Whatever the link to the men arrested,

officers believe the storage units have been

hired by an organised team using fake names

and, more than likely, paying cash to leave no trace.

But without knowing which ones they're using,

they've got to search all 200 of them.

-Is there a little one of them?

-That's all.

And after an hour or so of searching,

the team think they might've found some fakes.

We're going to bolt crop this container to see what's in,

lucky dip.

We have sacks.

'It's not long before they find what they're looking for.

'Hollister, a popular clothing brand.'

Take all of this out.

Again, unfortunately, not my size.

It's a big find.

The fake sweaters in this small container alone could be

worth around £10,000.

As well as clothing,

the team quickly uncovers an array of other fake gear.

PC Matt Smith has found a stash of fake car key rings.

Hands on, we've got Toyota.

Porsche.

Seeing if we've got any other...there's Mazda in here.

Numerous fake, cheaply made key rings with car logos on.

Produced for pence over in the Far East

and sold over here for a nice tidy profit.

From perfumes to electricals, the team are discovering more

and more goods they believe are fake.

Ugg boots.

A faker's favourite for years being sold on markets all over Britain.

Three quarters of counterfeit items seized in Britain last year came

from factories in China where some were made by children

paid as little as £10 a week and working up to 18 hours a day.

Meanwhile, the search is continuing to turn up even more stuff.

Here you've got two watches.

This one is how the watches are coming into the country,

unbranded, no markings on the front and as we turn it over,

no markings on the back.

If stopped in customs, it's just a regular unbranded watch,

which can legally be brought into the UK, no questions asked.

We go to the white one, once it's arrived has been branded

somewhere in the UK. We've got the Ice markings on the face

and as we turn it around, again, you've got the markings on the back.

That's how we go from one unbranded cheap watch to

one counterfeit Ice watch.

Heading to a local market disguised as the real McCoy,

these watches can fetch up to £100 each.

Counterfeiting continues to evolve and products can be imported either

fully manufactured and produced or they can be imported in part.

What we've identified today is that there is a manufacturing

element as well as the distribution element to the operation here.

In total, officers seized just shy of 40,000 fake items

with a street value of five million pounds.

They were destined for markets all over the South East.

We will target those individuals who are profiting from selling

counterfeit goods.

One, to protect the consumers

and two, to protect legitimate local businesses.

That's a hard-hitting message to those counterfeiters

and persons seeking to sell counterfeit goods.

Earlier, we saw how the National Crime Agency caught a gang

who posted fake jobs online to lure their victims

and then clear out their bank accounts.

The vulnerability of somebody wanting a job

is what they exploited.

But it's not the only way the fake job fraudsters

try to deceive us to get their hands on our money.

Keith Rosser from the organisation Saferjobs

has made it his job to fight the fakers.

The opportunities for the fraudster means they recognise they can make

significant amounts of money through various different fake schemes.

They're hitting all kinds of levels of jobs

so this isn't just the high-paid finance director,

it can be very general or entry-level jobs as well,

so it's hitting really right across the population.

And not all fake jobs are out there waiting just to be found.

Some of them find YOU, as Damien Glynn from Ireland found out.

With a wife and child to support, Damien spent five years doing

evening classes to become a qualified electrical engineer.

He intended to follow his dream

and work on oil rigs off the coast of Scotland.

Like most of us when looking for work,

Damien sent his CV to a number of recruitment companies that

specialised in offshore work and then sat tight for a response.

And I probably sent off to probably, 50 plus anyway,

e-mails to 50 different recruitment agencies and companies.

It was like fishing, hopefully someone will take the bait.

And before too long, Damien got his first bite.

An e-mail that appeared to be from a company called

Island Offshore UK

giving him the chance to apply for a job.

Island Offshore is a wholly legitimate company

who, along with Damien,

was about to become the unwitting target of fakery.

So when I got this e-mail, I was delighted.

I was willing to do whatever I could to try and get the position.

The job itself ticked all the boxes, offering a long contract

on an oil rig just offshore from Aberdeen with a generous salary.

Damien looked up the company and found out it was legitimate.

Everything looked hunky-dory.

The name of the ship they mentioned in the e-mail,

there's a picture of it here.

After a couple of e-mails back and forth,

Damien progressed to an online interview

so the company could assess his suitability for the role

and, to Damien's delight, within a week he was offered the position.

Words couldn't describe it.

I'd been working hard for years to get to this position

and I was just delighted to be getting a chance.

Finally I'd got to where I want to be

and I could barely contain myself.

A few days later, the employment contract arrived

and Damien worked through the detail diligently.

Everything on the contract down to the logo, to the company name,

everything on it looks and seems to be legitimate.

I printed it off obviously, I brought it in,

I showed it to a few people in work, showed it to a few people

in the industry just to see what they thought of it, is this good?

The answer came back,

"Yes, that's what a standard contract looks like."

So Damien accepted the job and gave notice to his current employer.

After I got confirmation from people saying it looks legitimate,

I was over the moon.

I couldn't wait, I was excited, I was like a child at Christmas

waiting to start. I had my mind set, I was off, I was ready to go.

But things weren't as they seemed.

It wasn't long before he was told by his new company that in order

to work offshore, he needed to take out some insurance.

I was travelling outside of Ireland so they said I needed

travel insurance for my first year

and so they put me onto their insurance guy.

He sent me out a quote for four different polices.

The insurance company they recommended was Norwich Assurance

and after spending £960, Damien was sent this insurance certificate.

So they say Norwich Assurance,

I presumed this was all good, you know?

But a few days later, Damien received another request.

This time it was for immigration checks which they told him

was standard procedure for Republic of Ireland residents

wishing to work in Britain.

Again, they recommended a lawyer for Damien to use.

So they put me onto the UK immigration people

and they said there's a new anti-terrorism law

brought in last year and we'd have to get security clearance.

As soon as anti-terrorism comes into things these days,

I think it's automatically programmed into your head

to go along with this.

Damien paid a further £815 to a different account to the

insurance fees, taking his total spend up to around £1,800.

Shortly after making the payments, he received this certificate

from the Metropolitan Police which seemed legitimate.

It's got the Metropolitan Police stamp, you don't question

the police too often and I don't know, can we question the police?

Should we question the police?

But I didn't question the police, I went along with it, you know?

So along with the police certificate there was another document from the

UK Border Agency, again with all the logos and signatures you'd expect.

With all the documentation in place, Damien was all set to start the job.

It was getting to be a lot of money for me now at this stage, so, yeah,

I was really looking forward to getting to work.

All my savings had gone now at this stage.

I was living on Super Noodles for the next couple of weeks.

Damien travelled to Aberdeen to meet his new employers

but when he spoke to the receptionist at the offices

of Island Offshore UK, there was no record of his meeting.

I told her the story and she just looked at me and said,

"Can I see the contract?" And I showed her the contract

and she told me I was the fourth person in that week.

The company - Island Offshore UK - was real,

but while the criminals behind the e-mails had used fakery

to convince Damien they were from the legitimate company,

this couldn't have been further from the truth.

The job he'd thought he'd been offered was an elaborate fake.

Damien had quit his job and spent over £2,000 on

fake insurance, fake immigration documents and flights.

A lot of it was mainly embarrassment and financially then I was left

high and dry and I had to go sort out loans, had to pay off my debts.

I've a son, I've a wife, I've a mortgage.

I nearly lost my house over this. Very close.

But losing money's not the only thing

Damien's had to come to terms with.

Career-wise, I'm back where I was four or five years ago.

And so it's basically, I'm building all that up again.

I was severely depressed over it, I wouldn't talk to anyone.

With operations as sophisticated as this,

it's clear why Keith Rosser is campaigning to fight the fakes.

There's a few clever things they do.

One is really using a similar name so it immediately makes

people think, "I might've heard of this company."

Although it's totally false.

Again, there's stamps on it as well which makes it seems like

it's an official document.

The actual rubber stamps, there's two on this one,

both bottom corners, signed as well as stamped and dated and

the people who they're supposedly stamped on behalf of have got very

senior roles, so on the face of it, it would make somebody think

this looks like a really sort of high-level, genuine document.

To this day, Damien still doesn't know who ripped him off,

but it's something that's changed his outlook for ever.

I've always been told that I've been too trusting but I really changed

over the last while, I've just, I question everything.

I've learned a lesson, it won't happen again.

Take a look at this, it's a portable hard drive used to store

and transport computer files like documents, music and photos.

It looks good, but it's what's inside that counts.

In this case, very little. It's a fake.

Sidmouth in Devon, home to amateur photographer David Trigger.

He needed a new hard drive to back up his prized pictures and,

looking online, he found what he thought was a bargain.

A two-terabyte, high-speed storage device.

I came across an advertisement saying, "Hitachi Neso, half price."

And I thought, "That's not an absurd deal, but it's a good one."

The drive was priced at 69.95. David did his research and found that,

before the half price discount,

it was roughly the going rate for a premium hard drive of that size.

So he snapped it up.

When it arrived the following day,

David was delighted with his purchase.

Very nice indeed, very nice.

Weighty, beautifully organised,

has like a plastic strip all the way round and the USB port very neatly

tucked in the corner and a status light for the drive.

But when David plugged it into his computer

and started trying to back up his photos,

the hard drive kept coming up with an error message.

I started to become very suspicious.

I kept trying different operations, I even went back to reformatting

the drive as it says in the quick start guide.

Wasn't really getting anywhere,

but still didn't understand quite what was going on.

David tried every trick in the book to get the drive to copy his files -

nothing seemed to work.

He phoned Hitachi and spoke to the technical team.

No-one seemed to be able to get to the bottom of the problem.

After wasting hours and hours trying to get the drive working,

David decided to take some drastic action.

I ended up in a position where I was getting very, very frustrated.

I'm getting nowhere with the original supplier, I have no refund,

what do I have to lose?

It's about time I actually knew the truth

and open this thing up.

But when David prised open the casing,

nothing could prepare him for what he found.

And behold,

there are the contents of the Hitachi Neso drive.

Two hefty nuts and bolts hot-melt glued into place to give it

almost perfect balance,

it feels just like the real thing when closed up.

You would never know once that's closed.

Crude, but crafty fakery.

The hard drive was instead just a small USB drive

with less than 4% of the storage advertised.

Nothing more than a cheap fake.

It was the worst fears realised, really.

I'd been duped in a big way.

It's humiliating and it makes you feel very much violated.

And unfortunately,

it's not just hard drives that are being targeted by the fakers.

With 75% of households in Britain owning a computer,

the data storage industry is big business.

Electronic retailer Alan Dylan believes the fakers have now

honed in on these things, USB flash drives.

A USB flash drive is just a small, portable data storage device that

can be plugged into any computer or device that has a USB port.

They come in a variety of sizes, all the way from,

smallest 32MB, all the way up to one or two terabytes.

The more storage space on a drive, the more costly it is to make.

Alan believes fraudsters are making money by selling drives that

advertise more storage space than they actually provide.

We decided to investigate whether some USB sticks

contained as much storage space as they say they do.

So we took to the web to put this to the test.

A couple of clicks later, we purchased a handful of sticks.

We also heard there might be fake micro SD cards out there,

used in devices such as mobile phones,

so we bagged one of them, too.

It was time to send them over to computer data recovery expert

Mike Montgomery for a closer look.

First up is the 32GB, which claims to be a Toshiba,

although it wasn't sold to us by them.

Once Mike's removed the chip,

he can stick it into his special machine and...

It's supposed to be a Toshiba 32GB,

TransMemory USB flash stick,

it's actually 8GB.

It's a fake!

Next up, a 64GB gold bar shaped USB stick.

Let's see what we've got.

It is a fake gold bar but is it a fake USB?

I don't even need to take the chip off this one

because it's actually marked on there, 8GB.

So supposedly 64GB, it's a fake.

And after putting two more USB sticks through their paces,

the last one Mike attempts to test is the 32GB Micro SD card.

This one won't even be recognised by the computer.

Well, I suspected this one was a fake, but it doesn't even work.

It's just hanging in the computer, trying to read the device.

That in itself is actually worse than a fake,

because it just doesn't work.

So out of the five Mike tested, three USB sticks were fake

and the Micro SD card appeared to be faulty.

It means you could very well be buying drives with less storage

than you're paying for. There's worse to come.

Not only are the fraudsters making themselves a tidy profit

at your expense, most people won't even know they've been ripped off.

So what you've got here is a genuine 16GB USB flash drive

and a fake 16GB USB flash drive.

They don't look any different from each other, just one's coloured

green, one's coloured red so when we plug the genuine

USB flash drive into the computer it'll read as 16GB.

So the computer's reported the size of the genuine USB drive correctly.

Now the fake 16GB USB stick does, in fact, only contain a 1GB chip.

Will the computer pick up on this?

And when we plug the fake USB flash drive, it also comes up

and tells us 16GB but we actually know it's only 1GB.

So a fake USB flash drive has fooled the computer into thinking

that it's 16GB, so what chance has a consumer got of realising

that they've been duped into buying a fake USB?

The fakers are doing two things.

Making the USB stick fool your computer into thinking it's bigger

than it is and making you think the stick is storing your files

when it's actually recording over them again and again.

If you put something on there, you want to be able to retrieve

the data and know that your data is actually going to be on there

so when you go back to get your dissertation, essay,

music files, you want to know that they haven't been corrupted,

lost and, just like probably the supplier who's sold them to you

is going to be gone, they might be gone as well.

You're only going to realise you've bought a fake

when it's too late and you've lost your data.

But the authorities are determined to unplug the fakes.

In west London, Trading Standards have just busted

a bunch of rogue retailers for selling a variety of fake

electrical goods in high-street shops up and down the South East.

Mohammed Tariq was at the helm.

Amongst the haul, totalling around a million pounds worth of stock,

there was a stash of fake USB sticks.

If it's a fake, you don't know what memory's on there.

It might not have the memory that it's actually advertising

on there or displaying on the packaging.

Luckily, the journey of these fakes to our homes has now been

short-circuited, but be careful - there's plenty more out there.

For people buying memory cards to store data,

beware of fakes because you may as well not back up at all.

You'll lose your data and your money.

This is an American brand of nail polish, CND Shellac.

Not quite my shade.

But for thousands of women it's what

they choose to have put on their nails in UK salons.

It's a successful brand and it's not cheap.

They seem to be the reason some salons have decided they'll make

more money if the shellac service they're selling is a fake.

CND Shellac is a nail polish treatment and was created in

the USA by a company called Creative Nail Design

or CND for short.

Nail technician Natasha Lee says it's a product that's been

a massive hit with her customers.

It was designed and created for women that were paying for manicures

and they weren't getting their money's worth

because they just weren't lasting.

Now the company says CND Shellac was some five years in development

and went through around 7,000 lab tests before it went to market.

Its ingredients are a closely guarded trade secret

but they claim 14 days without chipping.

The genuine treatment costs around £25 per application

depending on where you go.

So it's roughly twice the price of other nail services.

Now, here's the thing.

To use this product you need to be a qualified NVQ beautician

and approved to use it by the manufacturer

before you can actually buy the stuff, but there are believed to be

dozens of unscrupulous operators out there who are faking it,

advertising they're offering the genuine CND Shellac service but,

in fact, giving you a cheaper,

Chinese gel polish instead without the requisite training,

equipment or application procedures and because of these fakes,

customers are ending up out of pocket and more worryingly,

with damaged nails.

According to Gina Akers of the Hair and Beauty Industry Authority,

it's a growing problem.

There are many, many concerns when you have nail technicians and

salons actually offering services that they are not trained to do.

It's really, really important from a client's point of view that

they're getting safe and good quality nail treatments.

There are around 18,000 nail technicians in Britain

that are approved by the manufacturer to carry out

the service and this is how it works.

Once the nails are cleaned and prepped, the technician adds a

base coat and a colour coat and then finally a top coat,

curing the nails in the UV lamp for precise timings in-between

and voila! A shellac service.

Ooh, nice nails.

It's a whole different story when it comes to removal and that's when

you really see the difference between

the professional product and the fakes.

A lesson which university student Sophie Edwards has learnt.

I sourced a salon that was local to me,

that I'd heard from word of mouth off a few people,

that said they were doing the shellac and I went and tried it.

Actually did have a CND poster at the bottom of their window.

Process seemed to be what I thought was the CND Shellac process.

But after an hour in the salon having her nails shellacked,

Sophie was left feeling a little disappointed.

I'd seen pictures and heard from people that the finish is

absolutely amazing and it didn't seem that way

and it felt really bulky on my nails.

There was just a feel to it that didn't seem right.

When Sophie had the product removed,

it turns out her instincts were spot-on.

I didn't have a CND Shellac product and I'd had, in fact,

a fake shellac product. I felt let down by the salon that I'd been to.

I felt like I was a bit of a mug, actually,

especially the price that I paid for the product and for the procedure.

But Sophie, there's a lot of it about.

The beauty industry is hearing of more and more women

who thought they were getting the genuine product

but instead got their fingers burnt - quite literally.

Cathryn Hut thought she was getting the genuine product

when she booked into a local salon.

My first appointment was on the Friday night

and they applied the base coat to my nails

and then told me that it wasn't sticking to my nails

so then they decided to try and buff the top of my nails to see

if they could get it to stick and at one point that actually was

a little bit painful, which I think was

one of the things that made me think,

"Ooh, this doesn't seem quite right."

Within a few days, the nails started to chip.

One of the main reasons that I went to have a shellac manicure,

the thought of it not chipping and lasting for at least two weeks

and so I was really, really disappointed in that.

A few weeks later, it was time to get the polish removed

and then reapplied.

She decided to go to a different salon where

she was met by nail technician, Jenny Smith.

-Hi, honey.

-Hello.

-How you doing?

-Good, thank you.

But she was about to discover she'd fallen for a fake.

So when Cathryn came into the salon,

she said that she'd gone to another salon and asked for shellac

and that's what she thought she had on her nails.

It wasn't shellac that she had on her nails in any way, shape or form.

It was something completely different.

Yes, Cathryn had had a brush with the fake shellac.

Jenny tried to soak off the product.

We wrapped it up for the normal ten minutes.

And it didn't budge, it hadn't budged at all.

It just wasn't coming off.

When she did eventually get the fake shellac off,

Jenny took these photographs of the damage to Cathryn's nails.

On this one, you can clearly see the big white patch here

and then the thumb damage,

you can clearly see that these white patches are quite severe.

Looking at these photos now makes me feel physically sick.

I feel ashamed that someone in this industry has caused this

damage to a client's natural nails.

It took around six months for Cathryn's nails to return to normal,

an experience that's expensive and distressing.

It made me feel quite angry

and had I thought that there was even the smallest chance that it

would damage my nails, I wouldn't have done it.

Unfortunately, we're seeing this more and more frequently.

There's a lot of people jumping onto the beauty industry band wagon

lately thinking that they can come in and make a quick buck

by not doing things the correct way.

Natasha says the fakers are damaging the whole industry.

Good morning. Yes, no problem, when are you looking for?

The people that want and choose to use the fake shellac tend to

be people who are wanting to cut corners and cut savings.

With that, it tends to be the people that don't want to

pay for the appropriate training.

They are a blight to the industry

because they do taint the name for technicians

that are spending their time, their energy and their money

making sure that they're doing a good service.

But it's not just the professional beauty market

that's fallen prey to the fakers.

Trading Standards officer Simon Cripwell

has recently seized a stack of what appear to be fake hairdryers

destined for bedroom beauticians everywhere.

This is what we suspect to be

a counterfeit GHD product.

"GHD Precious",

it's got written on the top.

"Limited Edition gift set."

We've got two products here.

One is a GHD-branded travel hairdryer

and the other is...

..a GHD-branded hair straightener.

We've seen fake GHD straighteners doing the rounds on Fake Britain

before, but the fake hairdryer's a new kid on the block.

The beauty market is absolutely huge

and we are seeing an increasing number of electrical products

and other products related to the beauty market coming onto

market stalls which are selling counterfeit goods.

As well as a manufacturer's logo on the box,

this hairdryer comes complete with a vast array of extras -

its attention to detail amongst the most advanced Simon has ever seen.

These particular products come with very convincing paperwork,

They also come with the same safety instructions that you would

expect to find on genuine items.

There are no spelling errors, as far as we can see.

But has the same attention to detail gone into the safety side of things?

The brand has confirmed it's a fake, but is it dangerous?

Simon Cripwell's got concerns,

so we take the fake hairdryer to a testing lab where testing

safety engineer Lee Picton does what he does best - test.

My initial impressions are, yeah, you know,

it does look the real deal, basically.

The hairdryer itself, it feels like a genuine travel hairdryer,

good weight, sort of feels expensive.

Yes, but looks can be deceiving, so Lee starts with the plug.

So as I can see here, the conductor is soldered.

This can cause the terminal in the plug to heat up.

And that heat could lead to fire or to the plug melting, which is

why soldered wires wouldn't meet British Safety Standards.

I would deem this to be potentially unsafe in a household environment.

If you were drying your hair and the plug melted,

it could be dangerous,

but there's worse to come as Lee prepares to carry out

an important European-standard test

that all appliances of this type must go through.

Right, so what I'm about to do is place the polythene over

the air inlet and turn the power on and set the hairdryer to

level three which will be its highest power input.

This test is to simulate what would happen if the back of the hairdryer

was covered up by someone's hair or a towel, for example.

This will be restricting the air flow

into the inlet of the hairdryer.

To meet safety standards, hairdryers on the UK market must have

a vital safety feature called a thermal cut-out.

This will shut down the hairdryer if it overheats to stop

it from burning the user or, in the worst case scenario, catching fire.

If it's a genuine product, what should happen any time soon is

the thermal cut-out should operate, cutting the supply to the hairdryer.

But two minutes in, it's still going strong.

The thermal cut-out should have cut out by now.

As you can see, the plastic is melting

so it's definitely a fake product.

With the thermal cut-out not operating,

the hairdryer's caught fire.

It's given a significant amount of flames

and if this was someone's house,

then it could do considerable damage.

Without this vital safety feature in place,

the fake hairdryer has the potential to cause a fire

and also burn anyone unfortunate enough to use it.

This type of test, it is a bit of a shock,

normally wouldn't expect such a fault to occur.

A genuine product, thermal cut-out would operate and the test

would have ended without any hazardous situations occurring.

Someone could easily end up buying one of these dangerous hairdryers

and think they're not only the real thing, but perfectly safe.

Lee fears it's only a matter of time before they cause serious damage.

For people who've potentially purchased such products,

it's definitely, definitely worrying.

That's all from Fake Britain, goodbye.