Episode 19 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Police! Don't move!

-Get down! Get down!

-Get on the floor now!

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 and it works,

not to go through the hell that I've 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.

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.

And the Star Wars toy collectors fooled into paying for fakes.

I had a run of 16 of these, Palitoy Return Of The Jedi cards.

Every single one of them was made by the faker in question.

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.

Well, 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 certificates are fake.

The product named may not be safe.

And 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 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 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 packet.

Now, SGS is one of the world's biggest test houses and 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 newsagents 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 me £20, got me e-cigarette,

and I came home that night and charged it up.

Following the instructions on the packaging,

Tracy charged up her e-cig with the USB connecter provided with the kit.

And then she went to bed.

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

Me foot were hanging off the edge of the bed,

where the bed frame was on fire.

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

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

just chucking water everywhere.

Tried to put the flames out and 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 was 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.

And 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 Elliott, 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,

and 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 tested by us, that advertising is false.

SGS were so horrified to see their safety marking being

abused in this way that they hired Lela Baumer,

a researcher specialising in online fraud, to investigate.

Lela started by examining adverts on Chinese websites,

which were falsely stating their e-cig was SGS approved.

The scale of what she found was astonishing.

It was enormous.

It was the biggest case we've ever had and ever seen.

It was millions of ads, literally millions of ads.

We've taken down millions of ads.

There's still some 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,

because then it's not only referring in the text in the ad,

it's actually on the product, as well.

And, when Lela 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 these 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 Lela'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,

but this certificate has several security features on it.

The security features are similar to those on a bank note.

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.

This certificate is not genuine.

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

The security features on here do not match the security features

on our genuine certificate and the content itself,

when we've gone out and 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's alarmed by the number of incidents nationwide.

There have now been 70 fires

attributed to these e-smoking products.

We know 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.

So, you've got a hotspot where the device is

and then that hot spray of embers can go forward,

and that can catch carpet, can catch furniture,

it can catch 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 batteries are substandard,

it hasn't got the 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're 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 a 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

and 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,

and 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 own members we should be seeking to make sure

that none of them are using the mark. If they are found to be doing so

then we will be expecting those products to be withdrawn.

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

will be contacted directly by SGS.

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

these changes have come too late.

Understandably, Tracey 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 just 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 hair-care 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.

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

that 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, who are 13,

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

But it was already mid-December,

so Lorraine and her mum didn't have long to get hold of a Curl Secret.

It was really close to Christmas

so I didn't think there would be any left,

so my mum had looked online and she checked eBay

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

we didn't think there would be a problem.

And there was quite a few people 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.

And they both wanted to have a shot at the same time

so we used me as the model,

so they could both have a go and practice 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.

The first one had come out quite freely

and this just didn't come out.

So I just gave it a gentle tug

and didn't realise there was a problem and 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,

so it burnt my scalp,

and 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.

Obviously, 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 I 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 straightaway 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 to 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 genuine, we've cut away the top,

so you can see the action inside.

And we're going to apply plenty of hair and a lot of tension,

just squeeze,

-BUZZING SOUND

-and the hair gets pulled in

and forms a curl over the heater.

BEEPING

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,

WHIRRING SOUND

it just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling.

You see? The hair's been 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 greatly relieved it was myself and not one of the girls.

Later, we'll discover how these fakers

get the curlers into the country.

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 hand-held 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're highly polished, so 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 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, "These aren't ours, we didn't make these."

We were then notified and an 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.

But this dentist wasn't alone.

The MHRA had several reports of counterfeit drills

just like this one being bought 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, untested product.

So, what we've have got here are a couple of brochures

from Chinese manufacturers of dental medical appointment.

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're 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,

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 and 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.

An 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 fonts 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?

BUZZING SOUND

Oh, that's awful. That really is awful!

That's terrible.

I keep feeling it loosen as I'm using it.

I've just had to re-tighten it.

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 straightaway that there could be problems with the drill.

First up is a genuine dental drill.

We can see only a small amount of vibration.

This scale is quite small on that.

There is a little bit of side to side motion,

but it's predominantly working well.

We're 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 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 onto the fake.

HIGH PICHED WHIRRING 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're using it

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

It's getting worse now.

What we're 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 nought to about 60 units of vibration -

well over a 100-fold 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 off 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're starting to be 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 consequences,

if they inhale them and they get into the lungs.

That could be potentially life-threatening.

Earlier, we discovered how a popular new hair curling product

is being targeted by the fakers.

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

The first one had come out quite freely and this just didn't come out,

so I just gave it a gentle tug, I didn't realise it was a problem

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

Today, John Morrell from BaByliss, the company which makes the curlers,

has had a call from the Home Office Border Force Team.

They want him to come to the Langley postal hub near Heathrow.

They've found some suspicious units that they want us to have a look at.

We've found fakes in parcels coming in before,

there's a possibility that these will be, too, so let us see.

Thousands of parcels from all over the world

come through here every day.

A small percentage of these are counterfeit, dangerous, or illegal,

and it's the job of a specialist Border Force team

to identify these items before they're sent on.

Cindy Carra is the officer in charge today.

I've got some suspicious packages in this trolley here.

Um, this item is actually from China, going to Finchley, London.

I'm just go into X-ray to see what is in the package here.

And the X-ray machine doesn't lie.

From the X-ray image I can see packets of cigarettes in here.

As you can see, the counterfeit cigarettes are from China.

These cigarettes will actually be seized.

They are dangerous, because we don't know

what ingredients have been put in the cigarettes.

The fakers will often attempt to disguise the item they're sending

and identifying concealed weapons

is one of the Border Force's top priorities.

Well, it says tools on it,

but I'm going to run through the X-ray machine

just to see a clearer picture of what is actually in these packages.

If you look at this item,

you will not even think it's anything offensive,

but it's actually a disguise.

If we pull this out,

people use it like this,

it's actually an offensive weapon,

it's not allowed in the UK. we get a lot of this.

We'll seize this.

HUMMING SOUND

If you look at the package, you will think it's a CD.

But when you open it,

it just says, "Cardsharp credit card folding safety knife."

Anybody can put this in their pocket.

It's sharp, look at that.

Look at that. It's gone through how many papers?

We get lots of this coming through.

Rather than end up on our streets, these weapons will be destroyed.

But today Cindy's asked John Morrell

to inspect some suspicious items.

Fake BaByliss curlers are amongst

the Border Force team's most frequent finds.

This is the latest trend,

so we're finding a lot of this at the moment,

so I will actually call the right holders, come and have a look at it.

We've got four Chinese parcels.

So, it's a BaByliss Curl Secret, apparently.

Now, suspicion already,

-doesn't sound right.

-CLICKING

The lead itself is fake

and on here is the rating plate -

should be European, a legal requirement.

that's an American rating plate.

That's totally illegal. This is a fake.

These pins should not be movable

and I can twist them with my fingers.

So, that shows that the adapter itself is a fake

and potentially dangerous.

This sort of blue covering over the collar

with BaByliss on there,

that shows it to be a fake straightaway.

You'll see instantly it's not the right product...

..because...

..it's bright pink.

Very tacky, just feels...

poorly made, nothing to do with BaByliss at all.

This component here is incorrect.

It looks so fake and, of course, it is.

All these packages have turned out to contain a fake,

but they've not come from a single consignment or batch.

Each package was addressed to an individual British buyer.

John believes many of these customers

are buying the product from fake websites,

which mimic BaByliss's own site.

This fake website is almost identical to the real one.

Looking at the products we've seen here today,

they're going to addresses all over the UK.

Likelihood, they've seen them on a website

that they believe to be real, it looks good, but it's not

and they're getting fake products

that are electrically unsafe coming to their home.

Babyliss have now issued a counterfeit warning

about their hair curlers and advise people only to buy the product

from reputable retailers and their websites.

In recent years, vintage toys based on characters in the hugely

successful Star Wars films have become highly collectable.

These boxed figures now often sell for hundreds of pounds

and the very rare ones sell for thousands.

But there's a disturbance in the world of Star Wars collectables.

This figure and thousands like it are not what they appear to be.

Dark forces have been at work.

Is Darth Vader my father?

George Lucas's iconic Star Wars Trilogy

spawned a very lucrative line in merchandise.

The year is 1978

and Palitoy bring you Star Wars...

Back in the late '70s, these figures, manufactured

and marketed by Palitoy, were the best selling toy in the world.

The action figures fired the imagination of many a wannabe Jedi.

But these days they've become a much sought-after collectable,

with a great deal of that demand coming from the generation

that grew up with the films.

Jason Smith is one of these collectors.

Ten years ago, he came across

his boyhood collection of Star Wars figures again

and a missing part re-sparked his passion for them.

It was about ten years ago. I got my original figures

from when I was visiting my mum and dad

and noticed that I'd lost the blaster on the Princess Leia

and thought, "Oh, it would be really nice

"if I could just have an original blaster."

So, I went on eBay, bought one figure to get this blaster,

and then thought, "Oh, the next eight figures that I never got

"as a kid - wouldn't it be nice just to have those?"

I then went and bid on those and got those eight figures.

And that just opened the floodgates.

Jason started by collecting the cardbacks,

but soon moved on to the boxed figures.

In time, he amassed one of the largest collections in the galaxy.

Figures in this condition will fetch a stack of galactic credits.

Prices start at around £200,

but can go as high as £8,000 for the rarest items.

But, over the last few years,

Jason and other collectors noticed increasing numbers

of high-quality boxed figures coming onto the market.

Gradually, they became suspicious of one prominent seller.

He had a seemingly endless supply of nice German

and Palitoy figures to sell and has been selling these for 20 years.

Through a chance conversation, the small band of collectors

discovered this document - a sales list.

Their source was a toy dealer who revealed that, in 1984,

just as the Palitoy factory in Coalville was being closed down,

he'd been discreetly offered the contents of the list -

a job lot of thousands of cardbacks and bubbles.

The dealer told the collectors he'd decided not to buy the cards,

but Fake Britain has seen evidence

that another individual did purchase the list.

Now, what if original cardbacks and bubbles had been paired

with second hand repainted figures and then sold as boxed mint figures?

This would explain the mysterious collector's seemingly

inexhaustible supply of mint condition figures.

Soon, news came confirming their worst fears.

He was selling on eBay, through one account,

large amounts of particular figures and then, on a secret eBay account,

he kept buying up loose figures for the exact figures

that he was short, based on what was in the list.

At that point it looks like a production line.

You know, they come in one eBay account

and go out the other one, all assembled.

The fakery has cost Jason a substantial sum.

I had a run of 16 of these Palitoy AFA 90 Return Of The Jedi cards.

As it turns out, every single one of them

was made by the faker in question.

I sold them all at that point, got about half my money back.

Overall, on those cards, I'm probably down about £2,000.

When selling these cardbacks, Jason had clearly stated

that the cards he was selling were not true originals.

As a result, he only got half the price.

But not every seller is aware they're flogging a fake.

If you look on eBay any day of the week,

you'll see a dozen of these things on there

and maybe half of them have been declared, half of them haven't.

What isn't in doubt is that the faker has made a lot of money.

If you make a conservative estimate

and say he sold each figure for maybe £100,

and say he sold 100 a year, and he's done it for 20 years,

that's £20,000 right there.

Jason and a small group of collectors

set about identifying the signs of fakery.

This archive footage from the Palitoy factory provided

the collectors with a vital clue.

The bubbles were pressed to the individual boxes by a machine.

The faker wouldn't have had access to this kind of industrial

machinery, so the small band of collectors started examining

the seal on some of the boxed figures in their possession.

They discovered crude attempts to seal the bubble on to the cardback.

The most common thing with all the cards that he produced

is the fact that they're absolutely case fresh.

The one on the left is a genuine mint on card,

and the one on the right is from the faker.

You can see on the back of the card that the genuine one,

which was pressed in the factory,

has a bigger indent round the back of the bubble

on the back of the card than the faker's card, which is flat.

And some examples within Jason's collection reveal

evidence of the faker's attempt to seal the bubble to the card.

So, essentially, we've got here a faker card that's been opened

and an actual shop-sold card which has been opened.

With the real card you can see that there's the remnants of the

shop sticker and you can see that there's a lot more card been

taken off when the bubble was removed,

because it was obviously a lot more firmly attached,

whereas the card on the left from the faker has left

very little impression when the bubble was taken off.

And, if you look closely, there's a clue that this card

was sealed with something other than an industrial machine.

You can actually see, if you hold it in the light, you can see

an iron mark going all the way across the card

where the iron was applied.

We'll start on the Star Wars first, then. Lot number one.

Chris Aston is an auctioneer specialising in modern toys

and Star Wars is his top seller.

£120, the bid's out, 130...

With potentially 6,000 or 7,000 faked figures out there,

hundreds of collectors could be affected by the suspected fakery.

220 now, looking for 240.

The bid's here at £220.

Sold.

We asked Chris to take a look at the collection of one buyer

who'd recently been purchasing large numbers online.

Company director John Webb has only been collecting

Star Wars figures for a short while, but he's amassed quite a collection.

-Through here.

-Wow, fantastic.

It I take it you're aiming for pretty high quality,

in terms of condition, and by the looks of it...

So, we've got an Imperial Stormtrooper.

-This was bought off eBay.

-What's the most you've seen one?

I've seen some of these go for 250-300, no problem.

The first thing I'm looking at is the actual seal on the bubble,

where it's been pressed down.

We can't really see an imprint from the machine that's pushed it down.

My inkling is that this is...

a fake.

Another figure has caught Chris's eye.

The imprint's definitely, definitely not the same on these figures.

That's as if someone's just pressed it down hard with their finger.

It's still definitely worth money.

50%, maybe 60%, less than it would be

if it was 100% right.

It's just one of those things, isn't it?

It looks like there are definitely two fakes in John's collection.

Disappointing for him.

Interesting to see them as part of a big collection

where the vast majority of it is genuine.

It just shows how somebody can easily be duped.

It was really useful having Chris come along.

Clearly, he knows his stuff, he knows a lot about the subject.

He was able to give me some pointers.

He's verified that most of the stuff is genuine,

it's very disappointing that these two particular items may be fakes.

Dozens of collectors have had to come to terms with sizeable losses

as a result of the fakery.

It was the biggest scandal in vintage Star Wars collecting

that there's ever been and lots of people were furious about it.

I kind of came to realise that I'd lost, you know,

thousands of pounds and I was suitably upset about that.

It kind of tainted the whole collecting hobby for me for a bit.

But then I came to terms with it,

I came up with a plan of action and moved on.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.