Episode 19 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Police! Open up!

-Get down! Get down!

-Get on the floor!

Put your hands behind your back now!

Here at the Fake Britain house, things might look familiar,

but don't be taken in

because this is a house that's filled with fakes.

In this series,

I'll be revealing the counterfeits, copies and cons

that are flooding the market, fooling the public,

making money for the criminals and maybe even putting you in danger.

We'll be investigating those fraudsters who are cashing in

by selling us something that isn't real.

And we'll be showing you how to avoid falling for a fake.

Today on Fake Britain,

the fake safety marks on some of the UK's biggest e-cigarette brands...

I expect to buy something, plug it in, it works,

not to go through the hell that I have just been through.

..the counterfeit hair curler that's too dangerous to use...

There was no release function on it.

The hair was completely jammed inside.

It's 210 degrees it heats up to. So it was touching my scalp.

..the fake dental drills destined for British surgeries...

You have something the dentist will be using in your mouth

that could break apart and you could swallow bits.

For many smokers, stubbing out the habit isn't easy.

Some say this product,

the e-cigarette, is helping them give up or cut down.

We all know about the health issues associated with cigarette smoking,

but Fake Britain has discovered that

some e-cigarettes could be harmful in an entirely different way.

E-cigarettes, as the name suggests, are an electronic product.

The battery has to be recharged to use it.

This certificate states that the brand named on it is safe to use,

but the certificate's a fake.

The product named may not be safe.

That's just the start of the story.

The number of people using e-cigarettes

has tripled in the last two years.

Currently, 2.1 million of us are using the devices.

The manufacturers of e-cigs claim that their products

are free of many of the harmful chemicals found in cigarettes,

or rolling tobacco.

The devices are credited by some people

with helping them to quit smoking.

E-cigarettes are electronic and need to be frequently charged.

Users do this in much the same way as you would charge a mobile phone

and that's where the problem starts.

This barmaid narrowly escaped a serious injury

when an e-cig being recharged exploded.

Nationwide, dozens of house fires have been started by e-cigarettes,

including a recent fatality in Liverpool.

Many of the most popular e-cigarette brands have this safety mark

on the back of the pack.

Now, SGS is one of the world's biggest test houses.

They certify thousands of different products,

from bicycles to dishwashers.

So this mark should be reassuring. So you might have thought...

Aged just 43, Tracy Joiner suffered a heart attack

and was advised to give up smoking immediately.

Tracy knew she had to find a way to kick the habit,

but quitting proved tough.

I was lying awake at night craving, still, for a cigarette.

She turned to e-cigs, believing them to be a healthier option than tobacco.

I found these e-cigarettes and, to me, it was like a godsend.

One day, Tracy needed a new e-cigarette,

so she drove to a nearby newsagent and bought a popular brand.

My local newsagent had actually got this e-cigarette in.

I thought, "Yeah, I've heard of that make, it's meant to be a good make,

so I paid my 20 quid, got my e-cigarette,

and then I came home that night and charged it up.

Following the instructions on the packaging, Tracy charged up

her e-cig with the USB connector provided with the kit.

Then she went to bed.

But an hour later, she was woken up by a burning sensation in her foot.

My foot were hanging off the edge of the bed, where the bedframe was on fire.

I turned on the light and my bedroom were going up in flames.

I just ran to the bathroom, got the bath tap running,

just chucking water everywhere, trying to put the flames out.

Then I rang the fire brigade.

Tracy managed to put out the fire but not before flames

from the burning bed had spread through her home.

This room were gutted, the landing, the bathroom.

Fortunately, Tracy was able to act quickly.

I were very lucky.

The fire brigade said the smoke would have got me, if not the flames.

I was lucky to get out alive.

The local fire and rescue team investigated the cause

of the fire and confirmed that the device Tracy purchased

was from an established brand which was sold nationwide.

Tracy had used the device as directed by the instructions.

Like many e-cig brands available at newsagents,

garages and supermarkets across the UK,

the packaging on Tracy's device stated it had been tested by SGS.

SGS is an international test house, which tests

and certifies hundreds of household products every year.

Their mark indicates the product has been assessed

and approved by safety specialists.

It's a guarantee of quality which assures retailers,

from local shops to our biggest supermarkets,

that they're selling a safe

and rigorously tested product.

But Steve Elliot, head of corporate security at SGS,

has a shocking revelation.

One of the very few products that we do not test

just so happens to be electronic cigarettes.

We've made that decision globally. We've decided not

to be involved in that market.

We don't test any electronic cigarettes, anywhere in the world.

So it is very clear to us,

where we see our name appearing on packaging, and where it appears

that those products have been testing by us, that advertising is false.

SGS was so horrified to see their safety marking

being abused in this way that they hired Lele Baume, a researcher

specialising in online fraud, to investigate.

Lele started by examining adverts on Chinese websites which were

falsely stating their e-cigarette was SGS approved.

The scale of what she found was astonishing.

It was enormous. It was the biggest case we have ever had and ever seen.

It was millions of ads, literally.

We've taken down millions of ads but there are still some

ads out there with e-cigarettes referring to SGS,

but we're getting there.

These websites were selling consignments of e-cigs

to retailers across the world, including here in the UK.

When we get the physical products being sold in the UK,

we can see the same SGS logo on the packaging, which is scary.

Then it's not only referring in the text in the ad,

it is actually on the product as well.

And when Lele delved further, she found Chinese manufacturers

had actually been creating fake SGS safety certificates.

Here's some examples of certificates that are fake.

Companies selling e-cigarettes on B-to-B sites are using these kind of certificates.

We sometimes even find the same certificate being used over and over again.

SGS checked and quickly confirmed Lele's findings.

What I have here is a genuine SGS certificate. This is a blank one.

We haven't yet printed the results of the inspection onto it.

This certificate has several security features on it, similar to those on a banknote.

When we're asked to confirm whether a certificate is genuine or not,

we will start by looking for those security features

before we then go to the trader and ask them to prove

that they were actually subject to an SGS inspection.

What I also have here is another certificate.

This one relates to an electronic cigarette product,

but this certificate is not genuine.

It appears to be genuine, but it's not.

The security features on here do not match those

on our genuine certificate and the content itself,

when we have checked the content, the content is not true.

So this is a fake one.

This is a genuine one.

Clearly, it's the explosive potential of e-cigs which makes

the use of a fake safety mark so alarming.

While fires from real cigarettes remain by some distance

the most likely cause of a house fire, the fire and rescue service

are increasingly concerned about the dangers of e-cigs.

Mark Hazelton is reviewing the service's national policy on e-cigarettes

and he is alarmed by the number of incidents nationwide.

There have been 70 fires attributable to these e-smoking products.

11 of those have resulted in injuries

and we know there has now been one fire fatality.

And the explosion at Tracy's house

is typical of many of the cases that Mark knows about.

When a lithium battery catches fire, it's like a firework,

it heats up and then fires a cone of hot embers two or three feet away from the original device.

You've got a hot spot where the device is

and then that hot spray of embers

can go forward and that can catch carpet,

could catch furniture, bedding - anything that's in its path.

Electrical safety expert Steve Curtler has spent months

investigating why e-cigs are exploding.

Steve's convinced that substandard batteries

are a significant part of the problem.

When the battery is substandard,

it hasn't got protection circuits, anything slightly higher

than what they should be charged at can overheat the battery and cause an explosion.

As with other electronic rechargeable devices,

e-cigs are built to cut out when they are fully charged.

It's a simple safety feature

which stops electronic products from overcharging.

Recently, Steve ran a safety test on a battery

which came from an e-cig kit,

with the fake SGS safety marking on it.

And this was the result.

As you can see, the battery itself has completely disintegrated.

It was launched out of the cap that holds the battery, like a firework.

If it goes off in your house, whatever it comes into contact with,

combustible materials, it's just going to set light to it.

So you've got no chance.

For Steve, use of the SGS safety mark on products which could

contain substandard circuitry is deeply disturbing.

It's extremely alarming to see product safety marks

being used in that way.

Consumers rely on them, retailers rely on them,

to say that a product is safe.

The public need to be able to rely on the safety standards

that all of us have worked really hard to establish

make sure they can go into any shop and buy a product that's safe.

Understandably, Steve Elliot at SGS wants to see the products

taken off the shelves.

Where they claim to have been checked by us and they're not,

then we don't think those products should be on the shelf.

We don't think consumers should be misled.

We think whatever appears on the shelf should be what it claims to be.

We informed ECITA, the industry association which represents

several major e-cig brands, about our findings.

We found one of their members was misusing the SGS safety mark.

The association president is Katherine Devlin.

It may well be appropriate for products to be

withdrawn from the market

on the basis that they're misleading consumers

by having that mark applied inappropriately.

With our members, we will make sure that none of them are using the mark

and, if they are doing so, we expect those products to be withdrawn.

The e-cig brands which aren't part of the association will be

contacted directly by SGS.

But for Tracy and dozens of other e-cig users,

these changes have come too late.

Understandably, Tracy remains angry about the fakery

and the danger it exposed her to.

I expect to buy something, plug it in, and it works,

not to go through the hell that I've been through.

I thought I was paying good money for a good product. I didn't expect that.

The British beauty business is estimated

to be worth £17 billion

and it employs a million people here in the UK.

So when a new product hits the shelves,

often the fakers aren't far behind, because there's money to be made.

At first glance, this looks like the latest haircare product.

It says it uses pioneering technology to create curls

but put your hair in this and you might not get it back again.

It's a fake,

and as we've discovered, it's also very dangerous.

Previously on Fake Britain, we've seen popular beauty products

being targeted by the fakers.

Industry experts believe this GHD hair straightener is the most

frequently faked hairstyling product of all time.

But that might be about to change.

Launched with a glossy marketing campaign, BaByliss's new

hair-curling product soon attracted

the attention of China's counterfeiters.

The curler retails at around £120.

And inside the product is a microchip,

which, the company claims, can detect the exact point

at which the gathered hair should be released.

Ian Nuttall, MD at BaByliss,

invested hundreds of thousands of pounds to make sure the product,

which can reach temperatures of over 200 degrees,

was safe.

We spent almost five years getting the technology right.

This is what I would call probably one of THE first smart products

within the hair care market.

And the software that's gone into that

to be able to ensure that the safety aspects are second to none

took a lot of development time

to be able to ensure that we got it right.

The company was delighted with early sales,

but soon the customer services team began receiving dozens of complaints

about faulty items.

The product had been faked.

Around the time BaByliss first learnt its curler was being faked,

Lorraine Morgan, a senior nurse from Fife in Scotland,

was searching for a gift for her twin daughters.

This thing was advertised on the TV, which looks fantastic.

The girls at the time, my twin daughters, were 13,

were right into curling their hair, because that's the fashion at the moment.

But it was already mid-December

and so Lorraine and her mum

didn't have long to get hold of the Curl Secret.

It was really close to Christmas, so I didn't think there'd be any left.

So my mum had looked online and she'd checked eBay

and because we'd both used eBay in the past,

we didn't think there would be a problem.

And there was quite a few people actually selling on eBay, but this one chap had six products left.

eBay have stars and they tell you if it's a good seller or not.

And he was a good seller.

So that's why we chose him.

It arrived within two days.

Package for you.

So it arrived in plenty of time for Christmas.

We've got lots of BaByliss products in the house

and it looked completely authentic.

When the time finally came to open presents,

Lorraine's twin daughters were thrilled with their gift.

Because it was quite an expensive product,

they weren't expecting to get this,

so they were ecstatic.

And they couldn't wait to try it out...

on Mum.

They both wanted to have a shot at the same time,

so they used me as the model,

so they could both have a go and practise making the curls.

The first curl came out OK,

but then something went horribly wrong.

It didn't do anything, it didn't release my hair.

While the first one had come out quite freely,

this just didn't come out.

So I just gave it a gentle tug - I didn't realise there was a problem -

and then it just didn't come out. It was completely jammed.

The girls are 13,

so one of them was holding it

and her wrist went down a little bit

and it touched my head and burnt my scalp.

She was at the same time trying to get the hair out.

Her sister got upset and she ran away.

So my sister came to help and they just couldn't get the hair out.

So they switched it off at the plug to cool it down

and then spent about 40 minutes trying to detangle, because it was such a big section of hair.

Otherwise, I was going to have a bald patch.

By this time it was really, really painful

because the weight of this was hanging from my head.

In the end, they cut my hair off.

In addition to suffering a serious burn,

Lorraine's Christmas celebrations came to an abrupt halt.

Well, it ruined the night because my mum was sitting there upset

because her granddaughters were upset.

Feeling it was her fault because she'd bought the faulty products.

I was a bit upset as well, and the twins were a bit traumatised,

so they just went up to their room after that.

The following day, Lorraine called the BaByliss customer hotline.

Good afternoon, BaByliss UK. Jenny speaking, how can I help?

Do you know which curlers it is that she's bought?

As soon as I started to tell the story,

she said straight away it was counterfeit.

She quickly said could I post it back to them, which I then did.

The fake curler, including the trapped lock of Lorraine's hair,

was sent to John Morrell, head of Technical Services at BaByliss.

It proved be one of dozens of fakes sent to the company.

Prior to Christmas, John was receiving as many as six a day.

We asked John to show us how both the fake and the real product work.

We've taken a journey -

we have cut away top so you can see the action inside.

We're going to apply plenty of hair and a lot of tension.

Just squeeze and the hair gets pulled in

and forms a curl over the heater.

MACHINE BEEPS

Then...release for a perfect curl.

Now, that's achieved via electronics within the product,

a microchip that is programmed to instantly detect

the tension in the hair and reverse the motor.

On the fake product, that just does not happen.

We put the same piece of hair in,

we squeeze...

It just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling.

You see? The hair's being pulled in all the time.

And...

is now completely caught.

The only way to get that hair out now

is to cut it off the way that Mrs Morgan had to.

Lorraine's mum never got back the £90

she spent on the fake curler

and while the Morgan's Christmas was ruined,

Lorraine remains thankful the situation wasn't even more serious.

It was very, very painful.

So for a child to endure a burn like that...

I was just greatly relieved it was myself and not one of the girls.

No-one enjoys it,

but thousands of us face it every week...

It's the dreaded dentist's drill.

We trust our dentists. They're highly qualified

and they'll no doubt be using the latest professional equipment,

just like these drills.

They were bought by an unsuspecting British dentist,

but fortunately, were never used on a patient.

They're fake and as we discovered,

they shouldn't get anywhere near anyone's teeth.

The dental tools market here in the UK is thought to be worth

over £500 million every year.

And where there's serious money to be made,

of course, the fakers aren't far behind.

As we've seen previously on Fake Britain,

counterfeit dental equipment has found its way into British surgeries,

with frightening consequences.

These fake lights, used to set fillings, could harm teeth

and this counterfeit handheld X-ray machine emits harmful levels of radiation.

But for the first time,

dental drills are being targeted by the fakers.

And Danny Lee-Frost from the MHRA,

the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency,

recently discovered how dentists are being duped

when they buy these drills online.

These were purchased by a dentist from a Chinese-based website.

He thought he was buying from a UK-based website,

used them in his practice.

Clearly these drills look convincing.

This is a very sophisticated product.

They are substantial in weight, it's a very high degree of machine tooling involved.

They are highly polished, they look the part.

If a dentist ordered these over the internet,

thinking he was buying the genuine, and these arrived in a parcel,

there'd be no way you could tell that these weren't genuine

until he started using them

and then the problems would start to occur.

The issues with the product started almost immediately.

They didn't work correctly,

so the dentist assumed they needed a repair.

He contacted NSK, who manufacture the drills...

So he sent them to the genuine manufacturer,

who quite rightly said, "Well, these are not ours.

"We didn't make these."

We were then notified and the investigation started from there.

It's the level of sophistication being employed by the fakers

that alarms Danny.

The dentist was completely unaware.

He thought he was buying the genuine product.

Obviously, he was looking for the genuine product,

the website was advertising what he thought was the genuine product.

He was completely taken in, completely taken unawares.

This dentist was not alone.

The MHRA had several reports of counterfeit drills

just like this one being brought by dentists.

In one case, the drill fell apart in the patient's mouth,

mid-surgery.

That does fill us with some alarm,

that there were other dentists out there doing the same thing -

albeit unwittingly - using fake,

counterfeit equipment on patients.

Soon after the NSK fakes emerged,

a more complex case involving a British supplier of dental equipment

came to the MHRA's attention.

A British company visiting overseas trade events

was duped into buying an unlicensed and untested product.

So what we've got here

are a couple of brochures

from Chinese manufacturers of dental medical equipment.

And what would happen is UK medical supply companies will attend

trade fairs in China, for example,

be approached by these types of manufacturers

who will offer to manufacture these dental drills and other components,

but put the supply company's details and branding on the product,

so when they are imported into the UK, essentially,

it is now a branded product for that supply company.

The manufacturer will also supply the CE marked certificate

to show that it's been through a notified body,

so it's got EU approval.

That it's been tested and meets all the quality standards

for a dental product.

Any supplier of dental devices to the UK market

will need to see a certificate stating the product has been tested

and meets required safety standards.

In this case, the British company WAS given a certificate,

but it was a fake.

It purports to be from a European approval body,

based in Germany.

To our investigator, one glance at this said that it was counterfeit.

There were too many mistakes on this certificate.

But the medical supplies company who bought the products,

had them shipped to the UK, were supplied with this certificate -

they think everything's fine and as it should be.

It's the first time the MHRA have discovered fake certificates

being used to dupe British companies into buying untested

and unapproved dental equipment.

Fortunately, the MHRA acted quickly

and seized over 300 of these unapproved drills,

days before they were to be sent out to dentists across the UK.

However, the MHRA fear British dentists

could still be fooled into buying the NSK counterfeit.

Clearly, these fakes are dangerous.

They've never been properly tested until now.

We asked Professor Damien Walmsley

at the Birmingham School of Dentistry

to test the counterfeit drill against a real one.

I've got two of the hand pieces here

and, initial glance, they look like the same thing.

They both have the same markings on.

It's only when you get to closer inspection

that you notice that the real one...

The metal is much sleeker,

nicely finished and you can tell it's a piece of precision engineering.

The marking itself - it's particularly difficult to work out the difference,

because the marking looks very good.

If I look at this, they just look very similar,

the font they use is different to the fake,

but it has numbers,

it has the brand, it says where it's from.

Both of them have the same, except they're just orientated differently.

As a dentist, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I've shown these fakes around to many people

and they're just amazed.

People who actually service them, people within our own hospital

looking at them say, "That is absolutely amazing."

It just looks like the real thing.

So, the two drills look very similar.

How do they perform?

Well, that's awful.

That really is awful.

That's terrible! I could feel it loosen as I'm using it.

I've just had to retighten it.

So the whole thing is vibrating itself loose in the patient's mouth.

This is going to be disastrous if it's used in a patient.

Birmingham School of Dentistry have the UK's

only scanning laser vibrometer

capable of testing dental equipment.

The drills are like a spinning top.

They're designed to spin around on themselves.

There shouldn't be any movement side to side with them,

there should be a perfect spin

and if there's anything wrong with the machinery or the mechanism of it,

then we know straight away that there could be problems with the drill.

First up is a genuine dental drill.

We can see only a small amount of vibration.

The scale is quite small on that.

There is a little bit of side to side motion,

but it's predominantly working well.

We are seeing a little bit of side to side,

but we know the thing is spinning so well that it's not rattling.

We're looking at the rattle, but we don't want that to happen.

These should be made so precisely

that the actual spin is right down

the length of the shaft of the drill.

Now the laser locks on to the fake.

Wow!

So much vibration happening with it now.

It's completely different to the NSK.

It's actually rattling.

I suspect what's happening is that the whole hand-piece is loosening

the more we are using it.

And this would be loosening in the patient's mouth.

It's getting worse now.

What we are finding is that we see a difference.

So if we look at the bottom graph,

here it's about 0.2 of a unit of vibration.

If we come up to the top one,

we've got from 0 to about 60 units of vibration,

well over a hundredfold difference between the two.

And what's more worrying

is this is only an initial recording at the start.

We had so much vibration, it went of the scale

and therefore it was not able to measure

the amount of vibration as that fake was working more.

The difference in performance is colossal.

Professor Walmsley is in no doubt about

just how dangerous the counterfeit could be.

They look just like the real drill.

However, when they are being used in the patient's mouth,

that's where the danger is.

They're going to come loose,

parts are going to come flying off them

and then they could damage the patient's mouth.

But the worry is if they swallow them

or the really serious consequence is if they inhale them

and they get into the lungs.

That could be potentially life-threatening.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.