Episode 1 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Police!

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

Here at the Fake Britain house,

we'll reveal the fakes that are flooding the market,

conning people like you and me and making money for the criminals.

We'll investigate the fraudsters who are selling us

something that isn't real and could be dangerous.

And we'll help YOU avoid falling for a fake.

Today on Fake Britain -

the fake sunglasses that could harm your health...

I was absolutely devastated.

We didn't realise that I would have to lose all of the eye.

..the puppies with fake identities being trafficked into the country...

They came, collected him and took him away.

..and we have a close shave with fake razor blades.

It was tugging and it was tearing at my skin, at my hairs,

and I just had to stop immediately.

Designer sunglasses can be expensive, but you're paying for

the brand and the quality of the lenses that offer high levels of

protection from the damaging effects of the sun's ultraviolet light.

These say 100% UV protection.

Unfortunately, I can't believe that because these

and all the other sunglasses here are fake.

If you bought these, you might not only waste your money

but also damage your eyes.

Deborah Kane, from Manchester, believes she knows

all about the dangers of fake sunglasses.

When she was in her teens and 20s, like many people at the time,

Deborah was less concerned about the dangers of UV exposure.

She spent her summers topping up her tan

in sunny holiday destinations.

Deb and her friends were on a heat-seeking mission

for the perfect tan. No pain, no gain.

You knew you were catching the sun, because they could feel it burning

you and you'd be there thinking, "Oh, this is great, because I am

"getting a tan and I know, even though I'm going to burn,

"I will get little bit of colour."

As well as chasing the sun, Deb was keen to hunt down the best

deal possible on fake designer sunglasses.

We used to bargain with the guys on holiday to get as many

different pairs off them as possible for the cheapest possible price,

so that we could have a Chanel pair, a Dolce and Gabbana pair,

an Armani pair, as many pairs as we want.

A few years later though,

Deb started to have a problem with her eyesight.

I started getting double vision in my eye

and went to the hospital, they had a look inside my eye

and decided there was something pretty serious in there.

I went and had a scan done privately and it was malignant melanoma.

Deb had an ocular melanoma,

a rare type of cancer that develops in the eye.

I was absolutely devastated and at the time, when they first

told me, we didn't realise that I would have to lose all of the eye.

Deb's eye cancer was

so dangerously close to her brain that there was only one option.

Had two doctors that did it, very... really brilliant doctors,

that I wouldn't be here without them.

They took my eye out and the rest, I suppose, is history.

Long-term exposure to UV light is known to

damage our eyes in many ways and can increase the risks of cataracts,

the leading cause of blindness.

Cancers of the eyelid are also linked to exposure to UV light.

Deb believes her eye cancer was due to excessive exposure to UV light

caused by wearing fake sunglasses on holiday.

I do think that there is a link between wearing fake sunglasses

and me, myself getting a malignant melanoma.

We wanted to find out more about the possible links between long-term

ultraviolet exposure and serious eye damage,

so we spoke to Dr Mandeep Sagoo,

a leading eye surgeon specialising in eye tumours and ocular melanoma.

UV light exposure in early life may lead to problems in later life.

The effects of UV light on our eyes are being widely researched

and some of the conclusions are worrying.

Ocular melanoma is generally melanoma which is

on the inside of the eye

and there are studies out of Australia that have suggested

a link between UV light exposure and the development of melanoma.

When it comes to being out in bright sunlight,

the medical advice is clear.

Sunglasses are used to do a particular job.

One of the key ways of protecting yourself from UV light

exposure to the eye is to wear good sunglasses that have

the correct UV light-blocking properties.

Fake sunglasses may end up letting in UV light which,

over a prolonged period, could cause damage.

If you're going to use sunglasses,

then they should be ones with genuine UV protection.

And the sunglass business is booming.

We spend over £300 million a year on sunglasses,

so the profits to be made are pretty clear to the fakers.

John Jacobs from Scambusters South West has been

at the centre of one of the largest fake sunglasses operation

he's ever had to deal with.

If you can imagine a place similar to this,

it was a huge warehouse with wall-to-wall fake goods, this is

the largest quantity of fake sunglasses that we've found in one seizure.

Somewhere of the region of 8,000 different sunglasses

and we've got Ray Ban, Gucci, Marc Jacobs, Cartier.

As John discovered,

these sunglasses were a cut above the usual knock-down fakes.

Well, here you have what appears to be

a genuine pair of Cartier sunglasses.

They're set in a Cartier box.

Within the box is also the pouch

and the documentation that goes with them.

Quite impressive as you look at it. Looks like the genuine article.

If I saw that for sale, then I would consider that to be the genuine article.

And being able to dupe online buyers into thinking these

high-end fakes were the real deal was exactly what the fakers

were banking on.

By selling fake sunglasses online, at close to the price

of the genuine article, the fakers were making huge profits.

In total, the value of the fake goods that we seized were

well over £1 million. Over a six-month period,

from one site that these fake sunglasses were being sold on,

the criminals generated over £160,000,

so you can see how large a scale of problem this was and the amount,

the quantity of fake products being put out to the public.

Darren Ward and Timothy Tivney

later pleaded guilty to unauthorised use of trademarks.

Ward was given a 13 month suspended sentence and Tivney

a year's community order with unpaid work.

In this major case of sunglass fakery,

John was concerned about more than just trademark infringement.

Claims about UV protection meant that these fake sunglasses

could have posed a public safety risk.

This booklet says, "The high-quality Cartier sunglasses have been

"carefully selected to ensure excellent eye protection

"and maximum visual comfort."

If that is not accurate, which we believe it not to be,

because it is a fake document,

then there is the potential of causing long-lasting damage

to your eyes through unprotected UVA, UVB rays coming through.

Fake sunglasses like the ones seized in this raid are turning up

all over the country.

Paul Wright from Staffordshire Scientific Services

is in charge of testing fake sunglasses that have been

seized by his local trading standards team.

Many of them carry fake CE and ultraviolet safety markings.

When you see a CE mark on a sample,

you presume that they have been tested and been shown to be safe.

That is not always the case.

Anyone can put a CE mark on a piece of equipment.

There has to be something to back it up.

Ultraviolet light from the sun is invisible light that is more

powerful than what we see and potentially damaging to our eyes.

Genuine sunglasses should block out some of this light

and protect our eyes. Fake sunglasses might not.

Paul will measure how much UV light passes through a pair of genuine

glasses and a pair of fakes using this UV visible spectrophotometer.

First up, the genuine sunglasses.

A line should be drawn on this graph here, which will indicate

the amount of light being transmitted through the lens of the glasses.

If the sunglasses have adequate UV protection,

this red line should begin to fall when it reaches

the potentially harmful UV zone on the left of the screen.

And this is what we are finding.

Little or no light is passing through

these lenses in the UV, UVB and UVC regions.

So these genuine sunglasses should protect the eyes of the person

wearing them.

What about the fakes?

As we reach the ultraviolet region,

light is being transmitted through the lenses.

Paul's suspicions about the fake sunglasses are confirmed.

In fact, 23.6% of UVA light is passing through.

These lenses do not provide adequate protection to the wearer.

The consumer is at a greater risk.

And Deb's not taking any more risks.

These days when she goes out in the sun,

she makes sure she wears genuine glasses.

Fake sunglasses shouldn't be allowed.

It's shocking what they can do to your eyes.

If I knew now what was going to happen,

I definitely would never have taken the chance of wearing them.

Meet Joe and Princess. Very handsome little doggies, aren't they?

They're Maltese terriers, which is a very popular

and valuable breed, and they're worth around £1,200 each.

They're both going to have one of these put under their skin.

It's a microchip which proves who they are,

so that their age and their inoculations can be confirmed.

But what if the chip wasn't improving their identity, but faking it?

What if it came from a completely different dog?

It's the puppy smugglers' latest con.

Joe and Princess' chip information will be genuine,

but has your puppy's been faked?

This is undercover footage of illegal puppy

traffickers in Eastern Europe.

This woman is responsible for smuggling around 1,000 puppies

into Britain each year,

earning herself tens of thousands of pounds.

In a new ruse, illegal breeders are faking the identities of underage

puppies to defeat UK border controls.

Many of these puppies will be sold to unsuspecting British buyers.

Dog lover Sharon Fitzpatrick found out what the puppy identity fakers

are up to, the very hard way.

We'd been talking about getting another puppy for quite a while.

We both, me and my partner, like British bulldogs

and French bulldogs.

French bulldogs are one of Britain's most popular dog breeds with

over 5,000 new registrations each year.

When Sharon spotted this little fellow online,

she thought she'd found the family pooch of her dreams.

Sharon did background checks on the puppy

and was told he was a six-month-old British-born dog

with a microchip, passport and all his vaccinations.

We paid £2,000 for him, because, as far as we were concerned,

we wanted a proper French bulldog from a reputable breeder.

Hugo quickly became one of the family.

Just fell in love with him straightaway.

He was just the right one for us, so it was just so nice.

But Sharon's joy with the new housemate Hugo was to be short-lived.

He started coughing,

and Sunday lunchtime, he was really sniffly, runny nose,

really not himself, very lethargic, wouldn't play, which is not a puppy.

Sharon rushed Hugo to the local vet who could immediately see

that Hugo was just nine weeks old. The vet scanned Hugo's microchip.

He came back in and told us, "Sorry, but this puppy's been imported."

Bizarrely, Hugo's microchip showed that he was a six-month-old

Hungarian dog, not a nine-week-old British puppy.

His chip had been switched to smuggle him into the country.

He'd been given a fake identity and now he had pneumonia.

That was very emotional.

I cried, because we'd gone into the vet's with a puppy

and walking out with nothing.

And it was just a horrible thought of having to go home

and tell the children that we've no longer got

a puppy at the moment because he's very ill.

It was very touch-and-go then if he was going to come home or not.

Fortunately, Hugo did pull through.

But Sharon's ordeal wasn't over.

I get a phone call from Trading Standards to say,

"I'm really sorry, but we have to come and get Hugo, because he has

"to go into proper quarantine because he's been illegally imported."

And they came and collected him and took him away.

Sorry.

And that was just heart-wrenching,

because this was just all before Christmas.

And it ruined our Christmas.

We've got an empty cage sat in the corner and no Hugo.

Upsetting as it was for Sharon, Trading Standards had good

reason to rush Hugo into quarantine near Bristol.

For kennel owner Meg Purnell-Carpenter,

it was a matter of national public health.

Hugo could have had rabies

and nobody would've found out about it, and what is worrying

is Hugo is only one of hundreds of puppies like this.

In fact, thousands of puppies with fake identities are being

trafficked into Britain each year.

Under the pet travel scheme, puppies are implanted with microchips

which show where the puppy comes from.

The chip number matches the number in the puppy passport.

That shows how old the dog is and what jabs it's had.

Puppies have to be at least 15 weeks old to enter Britain.

Any younger and their rabies vaccines are ineffective,

but the fakers know that younger,

cute puppies can be worth thousands more than older dogs.

They've found a way to smuggle underage

puppies into the country, cutting costs by not having them

vaccinated, and that's what happened to Hugo.

The microchip was taken out of a six-month-old puppy

and then implanted into Hugo, making it a fake identity microchip

and Hugo was a fake.

In Hugo's case, the fakers gave him

the microchip of a six-month-old dog to circumvent the system

and get the young pup into the country.

The Dogs Trust is the UK's largest dog welfare charity.

They're so concerned about the trafficking of puppies with

fake identities that they sent investigators to

Eastern Europe to secretly film illegal breeders preparing

puppies with microchips, ready for export.

Many of the dogs destined for trafficking were being

held in appalling conditions before embarking on their arduous

journey to be sold.

Paula Boyden is a qualified vet

and veterinary director of the Dogs Trust.

She's worried about the routine switching of microchips.

So this is a microchip.

You can see it's a little bigger than a grain of rice

and it's amazing that something this small is

actually leading on to the forgery of all of this information.

It's worrying, the whole microchip situation, which is a means

to try and identify individuals,

again it's just being totally abused.

Paula showed us some undercover footage of an illegal puppy breeder.

What we've got here is one of our Hungarian breeders that was

actually implanting a puppy with a microchip.

But do these illegal breeders know what they're doing?

PUPPY SQUEALS

The puppy is certainly under some distress while she's doing that.

Microchip implantation should only be done by a qualified person,

but illegal breeders like this are prepared to teach other DIY

breeders, or in this case undercover investigators, how to do it

if the price is right.

We were given instructions of how to implant the microchip.

Now, again from a veterinary surgeon's perspective, that is

incredibly worrying.

You're implanting the microchip in between the shoulder blades at

the back of the neck. Too deep, you're straight into the spinal canal.

By swapping microchips from dog to dog, illegal breeders aren't

just changing the ages of trafficked puppies.

They're faking where they come from to make them more desirable.

Irish or German registered microchips are more highly

prized than those from Eastern Europe as buyers often assume Irish

or German puppies are in better condition, with a better lineage.

By swapping microchips around,

this puppy identity faker is making a killing.

This one individual is responsible for almost 1,000

puppies a year coming into the UK.

An individual bringing five puppies a week into the UK

could easily be making in excess of £100,000 per year.

And there's a risk of disease to the British

public from trafficked puppies that haven't had their vaccinations.

A worrying disease is a tapeworm called Echinococcus.

Now, again, this is zoonotic, it can affect you and I.

It really is quite a nasty disease.

The tapeworm will exist in organs such as the liver, which will

significantly affect an individual's quality of life and their lifespan.

Echinococcus is already kicking at the shores of France

and again it's not a disease that we want to have in the country.

Back at the kennels, it's a big day for Sharon.

Hiya, Meg.

-Big day to come.

-I know. I can't wait!

She's about to be reunited with puppy Hugo after a five-week wait.

Hugo! Gorgeous! Hello, baby!

Hello! Hello!

Hello, gorgeous. You smell gorgeous.

You had a bath.

We can now register him officially with Petlogs,

so then he's registered to me and he'll be our dog for ever.

-And he's not a faker any longer.

-And he's no longer a fake.

Male grooming is booming.

Over 160 million quid is spent every year on the bestselling brand of

razor alone, all in the pursuit of a smoother, closer, cut-free shave.

But, if you were spending your money on these, you'd be in trouble.

Because you've just had a close shave with the fakers.

Gillette razors are one of Britain's biggest

and bestselling brands of disposable, wet razor.

Since they hit our shelves in 1980...

..the best a man can get...

..100 million Gillette blades are now sold each year in Britain.

Made for men, but also borrowed by wives, girlfriends and daughters,

Mach blades are amongst the country's most shoplifted items.

They don't come cheap, at around £10 for a pack of four.

The fakers want a slice of the profits,

as lifelong wet shaver Andy Green discovered.

I do spend a lot of money on blades.

I always try to buy the latest blade innovation, if you like.

One day Andy received an e-mail from an established online

retailer offering him nine Gillette Mach 3 blades

with a razor handle for 15 quid.

It was the few pounds less than he'd expected to pay on the high street.

So Andy bought them.

When the blades arrived, the packaging looked fine,

I had no cause to assume that there was anything wrong with them.

The company I bought them from,

I'd bought from before and had been very happy with my purchases.

Andy didn't give the razor blades a second thought

until the morning of his next shave.

I opened the packet, put the fresh blade in the handle,

I lathered by face and I started to shave.

But...there was a catch.

I noticed immediately it was tugging and it was tearing at my skin,

at my hairs and I just had to stop immediately,

I knew there was something wrong.

The blades weren't cutting it!

When you're having your hairs tugged rather than cut

out of your face, it is quite a painful experience.

The feel of the blade I was using was really uncomfortable.

Compare that to the blade I was used to

and the blade I was expecting, which gives a nice, smooth,

lubricated cut, this was nothing like that.

My feelings were one of anger, having been sold blades that

weren't fit for purpose and they could quite easily have cut me.

There was only one thing for it, Andy sent the razor blades to

Procter & Gamble, who manufacture Gillette razor blades.

They stated that these razor blades were indeed fake.

I was really angry.

I'm quite shocked that these fake razor blades are being sold online.

They were a bit cheaper than retail but not enough to make me

think they were dodgy or fake.

Fake Britain wanted to know what a shaving expert would

make of the fake razor blades that Andy bought.

So we took some identical fake blades to Parsa Rad,

whose shaving skills are a cut above those of the average male groomer.

He has been crowned Britain's Fastest Wet Shaver.

He can shave a man in under a minute.

Parsa uses only the sharpest, genuine blades.

About the fakes... he's pretty blunt.

It has just been completely split into two.

The blades are uneven, as well.

They're going to catch the skin and will strip the skin off.

So...

..we shall see.

And Fake Britain did want to see.

We asked Parsa to put the fake razor blades to the test,

alongside the real ones with a bit of help from our beardy assistant.

The right side of our brave subject's face will be shaved

with a genuine blade

and the left side with the fake.

First up, Parsa gets to grips with the genuine razor blades.

It's very smooth and you can see the result,

how it's taking all the beard off.

It's without any damage to the skin.

What about the fake?

I have to be very, very careful and gentle. It's already pulling.

You can see that they're not shaving everything off.

It's an immediate fail for this fake blade.

It's a grazer, not a razor.

It's not even shaving.

If I'm going to push it from here, the client will start jumping.

You can see that, a very, very big difference.

Even I'm stretching the skin, it just leaves the beard behind.

The quality of the shave on this side is a huge difference

to the other side.

Parsa is left having to tidy up Fake Britain's rather patchy

researcher with his own cut-throat razor.

I would definitely not recommend these to use at home

because they're quite dangerous.

Fake Britain wanted to find out more about the international

trade in fake razor blades,

so we spoke to Francis Chalk from Bristol Trading Standards.

He's been leading an investigation into a woman called Jocelyn Hunter

and one of the country's largest fake razor blades cases.

What Jocelyn Hunter was doing was acting as the middleman,

or go-between, between the factories in China

and the eventual customers in Europe, such as other retailers

in places like Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Poland

and it was seen as a lot easier to get goods into UK first

and then export them out into Europe,

rather than send them from China directly into Europe.

But Francis's team was onto Hunter.

They intercepted a shipment of fake razor blades at Coventry Postal Hub,

which led them to a suburban street in Wiltshire.

We were surprised by the sheer volume of fake razor blades

that were basically being controlled from one small house in Swindon.

We've got 46 parcels here

and there's one e-mail which talks about almost 200,000 boxes,

which we conservatively have estimated a value of £2.5 million.

It was one of the largest seizures of fake razor blades

ever made in the UK.

It wasn't just the scale of the operation that was impressive,

the quality of the packaging of the fake blades was like nothing

Trading Standards had ever seen before.

This is a fake set of blades in my right hand,

in my left hand I've got a genuine set of blades.

When you look at the packaging,

it's very difficult to tell them apart.

If you saw that in isolation,

you would never know that was fake.

And the fakers' attention to detail continued beneath the packaging.

The quality of these fakes is very, very good.

It does really take an expert to tell them apart.

To the untrained eye, you'd never be able to tell

the difference between them and the real thing.

You do have to be almost impressed that they are such good copies.

Trading Standards finally had enough evidence

to arrest and charge Hunter.

Francis Chalk was at court for the final verdict.

I've just come from Swindon Crown Court, where Jocelyn Hunter

has been sentenced for 15 months for selling fake razor blades.

It really does reflect the gravity of the offences

that she was involved in, selling these fake products that could

potentially be dangerous and also insanitary.

These fake razor blades were seized before they could do any damage.

Fake Britain wanted to find out how easy it might be to buy others.

We bought 32 Gillette Fusion Power cartridges

from an internet seller for around £45.

A tempting bargain at around half the price of the high street.

We sent the blades to James Williams at Procter & Gamble for analysis.

He confirmed that the blades we bought were fake.

There's only one way to see the real difference

between our fake blades and the genuine article.

Under 1,000 times magnification on an electro-microscope,

the difference is stark.

What you see is the real Gillette razor blade here with a clean,

consistent and razor-sharp edge that's actually thinner

than a surgeon's scalpel.

As opposed to on the counterfeit, we see this,

jagged, uneven edge

which is going to give a very poor shave.

Much more chance of nicks, cuts.

When you see this razor blade, people will be shocked at what

they might be able to get hold of if they buy a counterfeit product.

It looks dangerous and it is dangerous.

You wouldn't want to shave with it.

That's all from Fake Britain.

Goodbye.