Episode 4 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

It's just an ordinary house.

It could be anywhere in the country

but this is a house that's filled with fakes,

and you may not know it, but your home could be full of them too.

During the series, we will be investigating the criminals

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

frauds and fakery,

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

On today's show,

fake safety labels on the powerful laser pointers that can blind.

It's quite shocking, really, that a pen with one button

can have such an influence on whether somebody lives or dies.

And the shocking fake dangerous laptop chargers flooding Britain.

I remember thinking that's it.

So that's how my life ends.

Now this may look like a pen, but it's not. It's, in fact, a laser.

The sort that's often used for teaching or giving presentations,

but because it's a laser,

there are very strict rules on the strength of beam that's being sold

and that strength is usually indicated on this label here.

As we are about to discover, these labels are being faked

and that means that powerful lasers are being mis-sold

and could end up in the wrong hands and that is highly dangerous.

Craig Redman is an air ambulance helicopter pilot.

When he's called out to a patient, every second counts.

He needs to be able to see clearly to do his job,

but he's coming up against troublemakers on the ground

who are shining powerful laser beams up at his helicopter.

And Craig's not the only one to be affected.

Recent figures show that in one year alone there were

nearly 2,000 incidents of laser pens being shone towards aircraft.

Many of the lasers aren't quite what they seem.

A lot of the labels that are on them are fake.

The pens are fake themselves.

They are made by the cheapest components

and not necessarily the safest ones.

The legal limit for laser pens in the UK is one milliwatt.

The problem is you can't tell how powerful a laser pen is

if it's got a fake label.

What is the power of that?

It could be ten milliwatts.

One that is maybe 20 could actually blind me and therefore I might crash.

It's Craig's job to get medical help to his patients

as quickly as possible.

There's someone that needs the paramedic that is on board.

There is somebody either about to die, who is dying,

and getting that guy to them straightaway will obviously help.

But one night when Craig was on his way to rescue a pensioner

who had had a heart attack, the very worst happened.

As we were doing the orbits around the town,

we got lasered from one of the green laser pens from a property.

Helicopter pilots are trained to keep their cool under pressure

but with a laser attack your options are very limited.

When the first initial laser blast hit the aircraft, the first

thing it kind of makes you want to do is close your eyes and turn away.

It's got a big dazzling effect, which makes it very hard to look out.

However, you've still got to fly the aircraft.

It's a very, very dangerous situation that we are in.

Police cameras on board the helicopter picked up

the source of the laser beam.

You can see how bright that beam is and how long it's kept on for.

Quite dramatic, really.

You have to imagine that the three people that were in the aircraft

are getting this laser into their eyes at the time.

It's taken me back to the night, actually.

Yeah, I remember it as if it was kind of yesterday.

Craig helped us to recreate the dazzling effect of being

lasered using his helicopter, a powerful laser pen,

and the cover of darkness.

Clear.

'What we're going to do, we've got a camera set up inside with nobody in.

'There's nobody in the aircraft for safety reasons.'

I'm just going to shine that into the cockpit just

so you might be able to see the glow of the laser itself.

So, here we go.

These vivid images show how Craig

and his team would have been dazzled on the night of the incident.

And it left Craig with only one option.

I elected that night not to land because every time

we did an orbit and an approach to land, we were lasered.

The consequences of that were the paramedic that we had on board

couldn't help the technicians etc that were on scene,

which is a very experienced paramedic.

He may have been able to help the patient

and get the extra care that a paramedic brings.

Sadly, the heart attack victim later died.

The true consequences of this laser attack,

delaying the paramedic and his life-saving equipment,

getting to the patient, will never really be known.

He would have been in a better place with better care

and better medical equipment maybe to save his life.

And that's still on our minds,

as the crew of that night,

that we could have helped but we weren't allowed to.

The men behind the laser attack

later pleaded guilty to directing or shining a light

at an aircraft in flight.

There's no doubt, though, that Craig was lasered by a pen much more

powerful than that one milliwatt legal limit.

It's quite shocking, really, that a pen with one button can have such an

influence on our job and an influence on whether somebody lives or dies.

A laser beam can travel for miles until it hits an object in the sky.

But what happens when the target is a person on the ground?

Teenager Kieran Waters found out the hard way

when he was minding his own business at school.

I was stood by the window in my form room

and one of my classmates decided to walk over and hit me

with a laser pen and just shone it point-blank in my eye, really.

At first, it just seemed harmless high jinks or loutish behaviour.

The laser was shone in my eye for about two seconds, if that.

It was really just brightness.

But Kieran soon realised that his vision had been affected.

My vision got a lot blurrier than it was.

There was also just a spot where I couldn't really see anything.

It was just gone. There was nothing there.

With his vision deteriorating rapidly,

Kieran's mum Rhonda rushed him to hospital to get him checked out.

I took him to the A&E and they took him to

the eye specialist in the hospital

and they took photographs of the back of his eye and did sight checks.

Kieran was examined by Mr Ahmed Kamal,

a retinal consultant at Liverpool's Aintree Hospital.

He soon found that the high school prank had gone horribly wrong.

Kieran had scarring, a very small "spot scar", we call it,

in the fovea area, which is most important to see through,

and one loses vision immediately.

Unfortunately, the central vision which is damaged,

that is permanently affected.

It was devastating news for Kieran who will now have to live

with partial vision for the rest of his life.

He allowed Mr Kamal to show us his medical records

to demonstrate the damage caused by the laser pointer.

What I'm seeing here is Kieran's right eye.

This is the scarred a bit along with a black spot there.

You can see that there's a big defect of the layer here,

which probably appears like a cyst.

Like a black spot.

That's the area which is damaged.

There's no doubt that the laser pen that partially blinded Kieran

was illegal.

No legal one milliwatt laser pen has ever caused this

kind of substantial damage.

This is a result of a high-intensity,

high wattage laser, just for a few seconds,

and it's unbelievable that such a small duration

can cause such permanent, irreversible damage.

Mr Kamal is treating an increasing number of patients with

laser pen injuries and it looks as though Kieran won't be his last.

Coming up, the man who made

and sold thousands of fake laser pens from the Lancashire suburbs,

some of which were 700 times more powerful than the legal limit.

Officers were shocked to find a laser device of this size.

We are mad about mobile computing in this country,

but from time to time, we can also be rather forgetful and that's

why there's a huge market for these things, replacement laptop chargers.

They sell tens of thousands of them every year,

and like any electrical item, safety is paramount.

After all, you have mains coming in at one end

and you and your laptop at the other end.

So what happens if your laptop charger is a fake?

Martin Russell is a teacher who regularly uses his laptop

when he is preparing his lessons at school.

For a while, he thought nothing of using

a replacement laptop charger ordered from the internet.

It was a regular day at school.

I remember it well. It was quite a nice summer's afternoon.

As I was working away, I noticed that the battery was starting to

drain on the laptop so I picked up the charger.

I held the body of the charger in my left hand.

Nothing could prepare Martin for what happened next.

I plugged the laptop charger into the mains and there was an almighty bang.

And a blinding flash.

And in that moment, I temporarily lost my vision,

lost my hearing and remember being stood in one place and,

for a split second, thinking, "That's it, so that's how my life ends."

At first, Martin had no idea what had happened.

Neither, for that matter, did anyone else in the room.

I just came back into this awareness of a silent room and all

eyes on me and I wondered in that moment what had actually happened.

Was I actually still in one piece? It was quite a scary moment.

The force of the blast

and the molten plastic damaged Martin's clothing.

What was particularly scary was seeing that the explosion had

actually penetrated through the tie, all the way through

and into the shirt.

You can see the burn hole in the shirt,

and quite clearly, the burn on the tie.

But Martin quickly realised that the explosion had, in fact,

left him injured.

In this picture you can see quite clearly

the sooting on my hand that was holding the laptop charger.

The pain I can only liken to a scald of some sort.

And the blast had left the charger in a potentially lethal condition.

I was holding exposed live wires against my chest.

It's obviously very close to the vital organs, the heart

and the like, and it's only by pure chance that

I didn't actually come into contact with those.

There were concerns that Martin could have received

a massive electric shock from the charger during the explosion,

so he was rushed to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital

to get checked over.

The doctor was concerned.

He took me straight through to the examination room,

and wired me up to a machine

and gave me an ECG to check the function of my heart.

He actually explained to me that any shock like that is potentially

very, very dangerous and could interrupt the function of the heart.

Thankfully, Martin was given the all clear.

I remember leaving the hospital and walking home with, yeah,

a new perspective, I suppose.

Thinking about how close I had actually come to

either serious injury or a fatality really brought home for me

how dangerous

replacement or counterfeit chargers actually can be.

Once back on his feet, Martin took a closer look

at the safety labelling on the fake laptop charger

that could have cost him his life

and noticed something very strange about the wording.

"This device must accept any interference received

"including interference that may cause undesired operation."

Clearly something has been lost in translation somewhere.

Hannah Davies and Mohammed Tariq from Birmingham Trading Standards

have seen exactly the same badly written

and confusing English on thousands of fake laptop chargers

that they have seized.

"Warning, this device may not cause harmful interference."

If anyone out there actually understands what that means

then please give us a call because I haven't got a clue.

The CE mark is fake and it's unsafe.

She's got some advice for people in the market for a new charger.

Check the packaging to make sure

that there's an importer's details on there,

that retailer's details are on there, that the English is written

in a readable manner and that you can understand it.

In a recent raid in Birmingham, 28,000 fake laptop chargers,

just like the one that exploded on Martin Russell,

were seized from an eBay trader.

In the future, Martin will be taking a much closer look

at the laptop chargers that he uses.

Having realised just how dangerous fake chargers can be, or indeed

any fake electrical item, it's a risk that nobody should ever be taking.

We are actually playing with our own lives and the lives of others.

Now we've seen how dangerous illegal laser pens are falling

into the wrong hands and causing havoc up in the air...

..and down on the ground.

And it turns out that fake laser pens are being manufactured

right here in Britain.

When Lee Ormandy from Lancashire Trading Standards received

complaints about laser pens people had bought from an internet trader,

he thought he might be dealing with a product quality issue.

This is the actual laser pointer in question that was purchased.

It cost 40 quid

and it was advertised as being one milliwatt in strength.

In Britain, laser pointers should carry labels

showing how powerful they are.

It's illegal to sell laser pointers more powerful than one milliwatt.

Lee decided to send the apparently one milliwatt laser pointer

for testing in a specialist laboratory

at the Health Protection Agency

and he was amazed by the results.

The Health Protection Agency found it to be 40 times that strength.

The mislabelled pen was blasting out 40 milliwatts of laser power.

The information label is fake because it's indicating that

the product is of the legal strength of one milliwatt.

But how many more powerful laser pens

with fake labelling were out there?

Trading Standards had enough evidence to take action.

Lee took us back to the suburbs

where the laser pen trader was raided.

This is the area where

the laser pen manufacturing was taking place.

The officers were astounded by what they found behind the front door

of one of these very ordinary homes.

Trading Standards had walked right into a laser pen factory.

He was purchasing the constituent parts of the laser device

and then putting them together in order to sell a completed item.

Thousands of home assembled laser pens were crammed into every

nook and cranny of the house.

And were even found in a large cargo container in the back garden.

15,000 laser devices of various sizes

and various designs were found,

of which this is the most extreme.

Officers were quite shocked to find a laser device of this size.

The laser pens were rounded up

and once again sent to the Health Protection Agency to be tested

by laser expert Dr John O'Hagan.

Bearing in mind the one milliwatt legal power limit for laser pens

sold in the UK, the results were astonishing.

That's giving us 80 milliwatts.

This is 80 times the level at which we would expect to be

available to the public and, of course,

it doesn't look any bigger than the other laser products.

That's a problem when these are just on market stalls or even just

publicised on the internet.

It doesn't look very big.

The sort of thing you can stick in your pocket

and yet it's a very powerful device.

John also tested this beast of a laser which was

seized during the raid.

They tend to be about 700-800 milliwatts.

This illegal laser turned out to be a massive 700 times

more powerful than the legal limit.

Hot enough to burn skin at close range if used maliciously.

It could certainly damage your eye in less than a blink of an eyelid.

It's almost verging on being an offensive weapon out on the street.

Lee Ormandy from Lancashire Trading Standards

was passed the test results.

It was time to take a closer look at the labelling on these laser pens,

which were marked as Sony.

It's got the fake registered trademark of Sony.

But more worrying than the fake trademark

was the safety information.

This is the information that is telling you

what class of laser pointer it is,

how strong the laser is.

These labels are completely fake

and they do not relate to the laser pointers at all.

Even the European safety marks on these laser pens

couldn't be trusted.

Those are counterfeit.

Those are fake marks.

This one here constructed in Singapore, again fake,

because these were being produced in Preston.

The fake home-made safety instructions were like a seal of

approval for any troublemakers tempted to use the pen irresponsibly.

In a safety instruction booklet,

I would not expect it to be telling me how to pop balloons

or how to ignite matches with the product.

That is not a safe use of that particular product.

There was more than enough damning evidence to bring a case

against the seller of the fake laser pens.

Tech Yun Hii was sentenced to 180 days in prison

suspended for 18 months and 300 hours of community service.

His 15,000 powerful laser pens were dangerous, illegal and fake.

They've now been safely destroyed to stop them

falling into the wrong hands.

But for Kieran Waters, that doesn't help.

In a few seconds, the laser that was pointed at him

changed his life forever.

It did affect him a lot.

He didn't want to go out

and he stayed more in his room, out of the way.

I'd say it's affected my school...quite badly.

It takes me a lot longer to read now than it used to.

It could possibly also ruin my future life

because I want to work in forensics

and that might not be possible now

because I'd require the eyesight.

The Waters family are still worried about others

who might fall victim to the power of a fake laser pen.

The thought of there being fakes out there that you can buy

so cheap, that are so dangerous, it's horrifying,

but it also makes me really angry.

It's just scary that kids don't know what they're getting hold of

and the potential damage they could be doing

just because of a label that says they're safe when they're not.

Of course, once the fakers get their counterfeit goods into the country,

they then have to find somewhere to store them

and this is where Trading Standards can make a big difference.

Stopping those goods at that point in the supply chain,

before they get to consumers like you and me.

Richard Nowacki, from Hillingdon Trading Standards,

has received intelligence there may be an assembly line for fakes

in a warehouse unit on his patch.

We want to make sure these goods aren't being sold.

Our main job is to protect consumers and legitimate businesses.

Today he's leading his team to the suspect warehouse.

They've got vans to remove any counterfeits they find.

They've even got a sniffer dog.

There he goes. The team's straight in.

Just look around you. There's plenty of boxes here to examine

and have a look at, and God knows what we'll find in them.

At first glance this doesn't look like a distribution centre

that major international companies would be using.

The team begins a thorough search.

Within moments, Richard's made a find.

We've just come across these watch batteries

and as you can see they're labelled Sony. They look a little suspect.

One wonders whether Sony would market them in this particular way.

If you look at the spelling here - "Madein Japan". It's "Made IN Japan".

Spelling mistakes are a giveaway that it's counterfeit.

I think these might be counterfeit and we'll be seizing them today.

And it doesn't just stop with batteries.

There are other fake items as well.

While the others continue to search the warehouse,

Richard finds what he suspects are supplies for a production line.

What we've come across is a cottage industry.

Here you see a range of stickers and they're just fixing them to lighters.

A blank lighter, and to it is affixed a Manchester United trademark.

And that makes them more valuable once they're out in the marketplace.

From the records they've found, the team identifies that the area

they're looking at all belongs to one man.

All of this is owned apparently by the same guy.

They ask him to come and explain all the counterfeits.

While they're waiting for him, they make even more discoveries.

We've got these earphones - Beats by Dr Dre.

This appears to be a production line of fakes.

The headphones are £130 upwards in the shops,

but these counterfeits will have cost a fraction of that.

Here's the headphones.

No logo. You've got the packaging there.

There we go. There's the logos.

The headphones are shipped in without any logos,

to make it harder for Customs to seize them.

With no branding, they're not so obviously counterfeit.

Once they make it to the warehouse, the logos are put on and they

get boxed up for sale for a lot more than they cost the counterfeiter.

All the headphones, which looks like they're a bit

further along in the process cos they've got the logo affixed to them.

A complete assembly line.

This isn't the man who owns the warehouse,

it's the man who rents it, and he says he lets it to someone else.

Could you tell us, out of this area, what's yours and what's not yours?

In this area here, what's yours in this area here?

No?

Are these yours?

They're not yours?

Are these yours?

The Sony batteries.

What actually is yours then?

So you're not taking responsibility for any of this?

Have you paid for this storage area? You've sublet it to someone else?

The other person who's coming down, you've sublet it to?

OK, so he'll take responsibility for this.

Surrounded by fake goods,

his answers aren't convincing Trading Standards.

The only problem I've got is obviously someone has to be legally

responsible for this.

How can you prove to us that this isn't yours?

Is there any way that you could help us to help you?

OK, OK. I think we'll leave it now, OK?

All these good are being seized.

Trading Standards believe what they've got here is

a production line, where counterfeit items were having famous brand logos

applied, ready for sale.

It's difficult to put a value on what we've seized today,

but I suspect it's going to be upwards of £100,000.

You don't have to say anything...

So who exactly is responsible for the production line of counterfeit

goods we saw in the warehouse? Well, it's still not entirely clear,

but the man supposedly subletting the space has never emerged

and the investigation is still continuing.

That's all from Fake Britain. Bye-bye.