Episode 7 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Get down! Get down! Put your hands behind your back now!

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'll 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...

..the fake car airbags that could kill.

I think it's very, very shocking, the level of injury that might result from these fake airbags.

The fake number plates that could get you arrested.

And the dangerous fake products coming into the UK through the mail.

People should beware if they are offered this type of thing to buy

that they could be harming their health.

Every year in the UK, 200,000 of us are injured in some kind

of road accident and of that number, 1% - one in a hundred - is fatal.

Now, the seat belt has gone a long way to reduce those numbers,

and what's under here, the airbag, has gone even further.

We've already seen on Fake Britain how car parts that have been

counterfeited are a real safety problem.

But when they're parts that are critical for your safety,

like the airbag, then it becomes a matter of life and death.

In America, it was a national scandal.

'Organised criminals are counterfeiting.'

'Thousands of people likely have counterfeit airbags.'

'..could be counterfeit and dangerous.'

'The fake airbags look almost identical to factory equipment.'

'They could fail to save your life.'

News that thousands of American motorists might be driving cars

fitted with fake and potentially lethal airbags

shocked viewers worldwide.

Where do these fake airbags come from?

Well, I'll tell you - they come from China.

And they're not just putting the lives of American drivers at risk.

Dave Hodgetts is the Managing Director of Honda UK,

and he thinks fake airbags could already have

found their way into British cars.

We're seeing lots of evidence of fake parts being

imported into Britain and they range from things...quite simple

items like oil filters and brake pads to much more expensive items,

like alloy wheels, or indeed, airbags.

It's the rise in Internet trading that is fuelling

the problem of car part fakery in this country.

Today on the Internet is a huge number of parts

that are available for sale, and many, many, many of those parts

are not genuine parts. We know what is a Honda genuine part

and all our other manufacturing colleagues will, as well.

And you can see a plethora of parts available on the Internet which are not.

Genuine airbags are bristling with technology.

They're designed to save the car's occupants in a crash.

This is a genuine Honda airbag

and this is the one that's fitted behind the driver's steering wheel,

and what should happen is the whole system in the car will sense

the deceleration of the accident and basically decide how quickly

to inflate the airbag - that will come through this front panel and

effectively cushion the blow that you would have had as you go towards

the steering wheel, so a very, very complicated piece of technology.

These are slow-motion videos of how a genuine airbag should

inflate in a crash,

deploying with such precise timing that it even

protects a delicate watermelon when dropped from a height.

But what might a fake airbag do in a crash?

Well, in Honda's melon test, something a bit like this.

Fake airbags might not inflate properly,

but they might also have the power to cause injury in their own right.

In America, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

tested dozens of fake Honda airbags seized from an Internet

trader thought to be selling the products internationally.

Dave talked us through the test results.

The airbag deploys but basically it just blows apart

so there's a huge amount of fragments being thrown

straight into the face of the driver, and a lot of explosive material

that's been released from inside the bag. The bag basically just blew up.

This is a fake airbag failure that could lead to serious injury.

Some of these items are certainly extremely hot

and they almost certainly would cause burns, etc, to the driver.

And that would have potentially very severely injured the driver

and certainly wouldn't have provided any protection from the crash

itself, so what's supposed to save you in the event of an accident

may have caused more injury. I think it's very, very shocking,

the level of injury that might result from these fake airbags.

And Dave believes that fake airbags like this have made it

across the Atlantic into the UK.

I think there's no doubt that the number of what we believe to be fake airbags that are on the Internet,

it must mean that many people in the UK are having them fitted to their cars.

So I think it's only a matter of time until we see this sort of injury

happening, and some of these types of potentially fatal accidents.

The problem of fake airbags is not limited to Honda.

Almost all major automotive manufacturers are being

affected by this trend.

And it's therefore something that's endemic across the industry.

With the counterfeit suppliers, we have no idea who they are

and what sort of processes they're using.

Dave has some advice on how to avoid falling victim to the fakers.

Go to a manufacturer's main dealer, who will always fit genuine parts

from that particular manufacturer.

But airbags aren't the only fake car parts affecting motorists.

As Hertfordshire Trading Standards and BMW found out

during a recent raid, the fakers are also targeting alloy wheels.

Nick Jones from BMW deals in real wheels and he can spot a fake.

Here we have a counterfeit Mini alloy wheel.

This one is actually very close to a genuine wheel and the stampings on the front.

This is another fake wheel we found.

Yeah, definitely a non-genuine wheel.

Hundreds of these fake alloy wheels were seized during the raid.

Now, at first sight, they're pretty convincing.

From the outside of these wheels, from the customer's

point of view, it looks very much like a genuine wheel.

The finish is of a high enough standard that it would fool most customers.

But the fakers haven't just copied the distinctive BMW wheel design.

They've also faked the brand name and logo.

These are counterfeit BMW badges. There are several in this bag here.

If the consumer gets the wheels, the labels would probably be applied

to it, the tyres would be fitted to the wheel rims. From their point

of view, they're looking as though they've bought a genuine wheel.

Had these wheels not been seized, dozens of innocent drivers

might have ended up paying good money for fake BMW wheels.

And as the BMW lab tests showed, driving around on fake wheels

like these might have put those motorists in danger.

We had some tests done by BMW in Germany where

they have tested wheels with a load being dropped on to them

to simulate an impact on a kerb.

This is how real alloy wheels should behave in the event of an accident.

A bit of give, but no breakage, is perfectly normal.

But put the fake wheels under pressure

and it's a totally different story.

It actually fractures the side of the wheel

and you get sudden air loss pressure in the tyre, which could cause

a major accident, you know, could cause loss of control of the vehicle.

There is no easy way of telling what a fake wheel is made of

and whether it's fit for purpose.

We don't know what the quality of the alloy material is.

Some of these wheels we've lifted up today are very light.

And compared to the BMW alloys,

the content of the alloy and the material is completely different to what we would use,

so the level of what it would sustain in an accident or an impact

could be considerably different and it could deform very easily.

Any of these fake alloy wheels could be dangerous.

I wouldn't like my family to be in that myself.

I wouldn't be confident that that, in any sort of impact, would be safe.

The repercussions for the customer is very high.

If they're in an accident, this could fail completely for them, you know,

which is really a big worry for us.

It's not only fake alloy wheels that we need to watch out for.

BMW have also seized fake brake discs.

Genuine brake discs should withstand the friction of the brake pad gripping them.

But there's no telling what fake brake disks are made of.

This is what happened when BMW tested the fakes.

The fake brake disc shatters completely into two pieces.

Imagine this happening to your car at high speed

when you need to stop fast.

When it comes to fake car parts,

it's crunch time for manufacturers everywhere.

Well, I think the problem of counterfeit car parts overall,

but particularly in terms of airbags, will get worse

over the next few years, unless we, as an industry, can take action to tackle it now.

Fakery comes in many different forms,

but it's at it's most shocking, perhaps,

when the fakers are duping their own flesh and blood.

We've discovered some parents who will go to extreme lengths to avoid

their financial responsibilities to the family after a break-up.

They'll even fake these - wage slips.

When Ruth Dray from Ashford in Kent separated from her

partner of 23 years, Stephen Banbury, she assumed he'd

honour his financial responsibilities towards their teenage son.

Naturally, you'd expect him to have paid for his son.

You know, he had done nothing wrong.

When the Child Support Agency, which handles child maintenance

payments, contacted Ruth, the numbers weren't adding up.

I received a letter from the CSA saying that he had now earned...

I think it was £220 a week.

When, six weeks before, he had been in the region of 650-700 a week.

Ruth turned to Stuart Richards, legal enforcement manager

at the Child Support Agency, who picked up her case.

Mr Banbury has attempted to show a lower level of income,

so the calculation of his maintenance which is

done as a percentage of that income would be lower again.

Now, most people try to earn more money, but not Stephen Banbury.

With a bit of detective work,

Stuart's team figured out how he'd done it.

He had got hold of an accounting package

and set up his own set of wage slips by putting in a set of fake

details into those wage slips. Consequently, he was able

to run off and create his own batch of fake wage slips to show the

lower income that he wanted to try and have his maintenance based on.

Ruth was sickened to learn of

the lengths that her ex had gone to to avoid contributing

towards their son's living costs.

He was making sure that he'd pay the minimal amount possible.

That's what he thought of his own son. I think he's disgusting.

Stuart is showing us Stephen Banbury's fakery in black and white.

I've got here the real wage slips that show Mr Banbury's true income,

and the fake wage slips that Mr Banbury dummied up.

Banbury should have been paying £80 a week in child maintenance.

He used his fake wage slips to slash that payment to just £34.

This is a crime that I think is possibly the most heartless and despicable you could come cross.

This is where a person is being asked to do the most basic

thing in life - provide support for their child.

What they attempt to do in this, they attempt to avoid their responsibilities.

They will go to extreme lengths to do it.

Shockingly, it isn't an isolated case.

This is a crime that we're seeing an increase in the level of.

We're detecting at least two such cases each month.

Stuart shows us how the fakers can try to shirk

their financial duties with just a few clicks of a mouse.

I am just putting in a simple search under "fake wage slips".

Already, I'm offered 20 sites just on the first page

in front of me, and it runs to more than ten pages.

These firms are offering services such as replacement wage slips,

replacement P60 documentation.

It causes me genuine alarm to think how people might use these

sites to show that your income was either considerably lower

or considerably higher than it really was.

Banbury had in fact paid Ruth and their son, Brad,

nothing at all for three years, saving himself around £12,000.

But his financial gain was their devastating loss.

I'm now actually in debt for about £25,000.

The only person who's going to suffer from that at the moment

is his own son.

What I haven't got, he doesn't get.

The clothes, money for going out with friends,

even down to taking his driving lessons.

I can't afford that for him.

Ruth even lost the family home where she had lived for 18 years.

That was probably the worst part, losing the house.

I think that was one of the worst things for my son, you know.

He didn't want to leave there.

Finally, though, Ruth fought back.

Together with Stuart and his team at the Child Support Agency,

a case was built against Stephen Banbury.

Finally, judgement day arrived for the wage slip faker.

Banbury faced two charges.

The first was under the Fraud Act for false representation on a child maintenance form.

The second was under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act for forging five wage slips.

After a long wait, the verdict was in.

Stephen Banbury was here today accused of faking wage slips.

He's pleaded guilty to that and, as a consequence,

he now has a criminal record against him.

Banbury was sentenced to 120 days in prison for each offence,

suspended for 12 months.

He also received 120 hours of community service

and was ordered to pay £200 in court costs.

If he had got away with this fraud, he'd have deprived his own child

of thousands of pounds worth of maintenance.

Mr Banbury is now going to have to pay all that maintenance,

and we'll pursue him vigorously.

We tried to speak to Mr Banbury after he was found guilty.

He seemed to think there had been some kind of mistake.

I never done it in the first place.

But he did do it, and the guilty verdicts against him

are a life-changing outcome for Ruth.

I can move on now. I know that he's not got away with it.

Hopefully, he'll be made to pay now

and Brad can have the things that he's missed out on.

In the past on Fake Britain, we've investigated

the fake number plates that are being sold by some unscrupulous companies.

Now, if a criminal gets hold of a number plate that's

the same as yours, they can put it on another vehicle and then use that

vehicle to commit crimes for which, in the end, you could be blamed.

The fakers are out there.

Trading Standards say they've got your number.

Previously on Fake Britain we've been out with Trading Standards

and the police when they raided a company making

and selling fake number plates.

-Listen, you've stood there with an attitude to me the whole time.

-No, I haven't.

-You have. Let me speak.

-You're under arrest. You're not moving your car, OK?

-Don't push me. Don't touch, man.

But despite the crackdown, other number plate fakers might still be at it.

Deborah Charles from Milton Keynes Trading Standards

is heading up a unit following up the intelligence that

a company could be selling fake number plates over the Internet.

When the officers arrive at the scene, they run straight into one of the company directors.

Deborah Charles, Milton Keynes Trading Standards.

We're here because I believe you're producing number plates which have got trademarks applied to them

without the authorisation of the trademark holder.

But fake trademarks aren't the only problem with the number plates

thought to be sold by this company.

You're not registered with the vehicle driving licence agency to produce number plates.

Any company selling number plates for use on the road must be

registered with the DVLA

and must check that the customers have the right documentation.

Otherwise, criminals could order a fake number plate that already

belongs to an innocent driver and then use that vehicle to commit crimes.

My colleagues here at the police are going to arrest.

The man is immediately arrested.

He's taken to off to a police van

and then to the local police station.

Back in the office, it's time to have a good look around.

These are blank number plates.

To the left, there are the laminators.

It's starting to look like a fake number plate factory.

We've got the acetates that go onto these blank plates here.

Down here, we've got some parcels that are obviously

ready for posting. These are the printing equipment and this

is the computer where the majority of the information is going to be on.

The company is thought to be selling fake number plates that carry

fake car manufacturer trademarks on them.

It's got the BMW logo applied to it and I'm almost certain that

BMW won't have given permission for that trademark to be used.

And if this company isn't registered to sell number plates,

the registration number they're printing

and selling could already be owned by an innocent motorist.

There is the possibility that criminals could use companies

such as this to produce number plates which are later used in crime.

They could find a vehicle, something in a car park,

get the similar number plate and the same type of car,

and then go and, you know, commit an armed robbery in that vehicle.

If that number plate is noticed by witnesses, of course,

the innocent person is then going to be contacted by the police

and it's going to be very inconvenient for them.

Business is clearly booming.

An average order is going to be about £25 for a pair of plates.

Information that we've already seen, that we've already seized,

said that they had 175 orders to produce in just one day.

So this company could be raking in over £2,000 a day.

But something's not quite adding up.

If they're turning over that sort of huge volume,

where are all the blank plates ready to be printed on?

They have definitely got a storage, somewhere else, of the blank plates,

because that's not all the blank plates.

With a bit of digging, it's not long before Officer Nat Keen has a breakthrough.

-Excellent detective work, Nat.

-There you go.

We've just found an address there, so it appears

that all the blank number plates get delivered there.

It's good news, because there's lots down here. A massive operation.

The officers swiftly bag and tag all the number plates,

printers and computer equipment that they've seized.

And, with no time to lose, it's on to the next location

to see if they can track down the blank number plates that will prove

the sheer scale of this operation.

There weren't sufficient number plates on the premises

to keep them going for very long, so I do suspect that they have got a lock-up somewhere

where they keep these blank plates. That's where we're heading now.

But when they arrive they're unable to get in.

Luckily, the neighbours around here are pretty helpful.

Yeah, if you don't mind giving me that.

Deborah can now get one of the number plate company employees on the phone,

and it's not long before he turns up.

-Hi, I'm Deborah Charles from Milton Keynes Trading Standards.

-Hiya.

At first, he seems pretty helpful and lets them straight in.

There are invoices that show that number plates

and blank number plates are sent here.

-Yeah, that's correct.

-Right, are there some here

to make things more speedy?

So the man says there are no number plates here,

but the officers want to see for themselves,

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

-Here's a Volkswagen logo.

-Oh, excellent.

Yeah, there's a Citroen trademark plate there

and a Volkswagen on that one.

Now Deborah's about to find out what they were looking for all along.

There could be between four and 500 plates here, blank plates.

This is probably about a week's worth of blank number plates.

The interception of this weekly delivery confirms that

the company could be producing hundreds of fake number plates a day

and making tens of thousands of pounds a week.

They believe there's more than enough evidence to arrest the second man.

I believe that you failed to register on the DVLA database

as a supplier of vehicle number plates.

For Deborah, it's a great result.

Today's seizures could prevent innocent motorists from being

blamed for crimes committed by people who use a fake

version of their number plate.

Here on Fake Britain, we've seen the extraordinary lengths that

some counterfeiters will go to get their dodgy,

and sometimes dangerous, goods into the country.

They smuggle them in through our ports and airports,

concealed in containers, or secreted in suitcases.

There are times, of course,

when they don't bother and they just send them through the post.

We've been with the UK's border agency to see what they discover

in just a few hours at one of the UK's largest postal hubs.

Each year, millions of parcels coming into the UK are sorted here

at Coventry International Postal Hub.

Many of those parcels contain counterfeit goods but,

unluckily for the fakers,

hawkeye Border Force officers Haskins and Singh are on the case.

We've had a variety of different types of goods

that are suspected to be counterfeit.

We will put them through the x-ray which should show,

in most cases, what the actual type of goods are.

The fakers are trying to dupe unsuspecting shoppers like you

or me with high end fake goods that increasingly look genuine.

But, for Officer Haskins, it's about more than stopping shoppers from getting ripped off.

It's about saving their lives.

There can be flammability problems, toxic substances used to make them.

There is a big health and safety risk.

People might think that they are getting a good bargain,

but if it catches fire, or electrocutes them,

then it's not so good.

Today, the officers have identified some packages suspected

of containing counterfeit items.

Immediately, they take them out of circulation.

It's time to see what's inside this package,

which the sender reckons is only worth 20.

It's a load of DVDs with a fake valuation.

We've got The Little Mermaid, there, and, as you can see,

there was a lot more DVDs that would warrant a 20 value.

And these fake DVDs are in a different league to the ones

-you might find down your local market.

-It has a hologram.

It's properly wrapped, and I don't think someone would be able to tell

that that was counterfeit if they were to pick that up off a shop shelf.

With the fakers producing DVDs of such high quality, the rewards could have been huge

if they'd smuggled this batch past Border Force.

There's about 100 DVDs in there.

If they're selling those as the real McCoy in the shops,

there are very big profit margins for them.

You can see here, we've got UGG Australia.

And we've even got authenticity cards

even again, on the plastic packaging, to throw the customer.

They'll think that's got to be real because it's not just come in a plain, plastic bag,

it's got a real box.

As a layman, looking at that,

without the other clues that are on the packaging and that sort of thing,

you'd probably not ever tell that was fake.

And, as with the DVDs, they've gone to great trouble to fake

individual technical details which would fool most people.

They've actually faked the hologram that would be on the genuine product.

The customer would see that and think, that's got to be real, it's got the hologram on.

All these little bits of information that the counterfeiters do are to throw the customer.

But the fakers aren't just into fashion, they're into sport, as well,

as Officer Haskins is about to find out, with this next package.

So we have a fake Ping golf club here.

I have been told by people that play golf

that they are a very good-quality fake.

It does feel like a lightweight, professional piece of kit, really.

Nothing is safe from the fakers, not even electronic gadgets.

We've got these Nintendo DS games consoles, here.

Quite well packed.

All three different colours.

There's an instruction manual here, an instruction booklet,

it's quite impressive, the quality of them. It's very hard to tell.

I mean, if I didn't work here I probably wouldn't know what

I'm buying on the High Street.

From a health and safety perspective, fake goods are

perhaps at their most shocking when they come in the form of medicines.

We've seen fake Viagra on Fake Britain before, and it looks

as though Officer Haskins is about to stop another

load of it from entering the country.

These will probably just be sold on the street to people in pubs and things like that.

The organised gangs are upping their game,

just to make this as marketable as possible to the general public.

It's actually embossed with Viagra.

There's a logo, as well, in the actual tablet.

But these fake tablets wouldn't just spoil your evening,

they could ruin your health.

There's no way of knowing the conditions under which this

fake Viagra has been manufactured.

It could contain fillers that are toxic, as well,

with the active ingredient.

People should be wary, if they are offered this type of thing to buy,

that they could be harming their health.

In this one package alone, there are enough fake Viagra tablets

to make the fakers a massive profit.

Probably, 4,000 or 5,000 individual tablets in there, I would say.

They might get sold on the street for £1 or £2 each,

something like that.

So you can see, it can be quite lucrative for someone

who is willing to take the risk of importing these.

It's a great day's work for the officers so far,

but it isn't over yet, as Officer Singh's got his eye

on something really worrying.

These are fake.

It's basically a human growth hormone people use,

such as bodybuilders.

This is potentially a very dangerous cargo.

You're meant to store it at a certain temperature

and, obviously, being in a parcel, it's nowhere near that temperature.

However it got here, maybe in a plane of freight.

From high-end fake fashion to convincing fake medicines,

today's haul is a sign that the fakers are becoming increasingly sophisticated,

but the confiscated packages also represent another good day's work

for the Border Force officers at Coventry International Postal Hub.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd