Episode 8 Fake Britain

Welcome to a world where nothing is as it seems.

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Get down, get down!

-Get on the floor!

-Get 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.

Police, could you open up, please?

Today on Fake Britain...

The fake car head lamp bulbs that could cause a serious accident.

Every time you go out in your car at night-time,

you're in serious danger.

The fake prom dress that ruined one teenager's big day.

The beads are falling off, this has actually turned into a hole.

What am I going to do?

The fake memory cards that could cost you your most precious moments.

There is corrupt files. It's very suspicious.

You probably don't give them a second thought,

you just flick a switch and your car head lamps are on.

This is the type of bulb most cars used to have in their head lamps -

halogen. Now, though, they tend to have these xenon bulbs,

more expensive but the manufacturers say they last longer

and because they're brighter, they are safer.

This one won't be safer, though.

It's likely to be more dangerous because it's a fake.

Nearly half of all road accidents take place at night.

As darkness falls, reliable head lamp bulbs

become essential for motorists to see where they're going.

But what if the bulbs in your car were fake?

Trading Standards are hunting for fake bulbs that might cut out

unexpectedly when you most need them on a dark road at night.

It's early morning.

Officers from Brent Trading Standards and the Metropolitan Police

are on the trail of a suspected seller of potentially dangerous

fake car head lamp bulbs.

They're thought to be operating out of two addresses.

Trading Standards officer John Ashby is leading one of the teams.

We suspect that counterfeit xenon head lamp bulbs

are being either stored or supplied.

It's one or two premises, both residential,

that are being raided simultaneously today.

Fake xenon head lamp bulbs can dazzle oncoming drivers.

They've also been known to overheat,

causing electrical failure and even fires inside the users' cars.

Keith Rafferty, from manufacturers Osram,

and Richard Armstrong, from Philips,

are on hand to help identify any fakes that might be found.

Hopefully, today we can get the opportunity to put a stop to this

counterfeit operation,

because our prime consideration is the safety of our consumers.

As John's team assembles outside the first address of interest,

Trading Standards officer Simon Legg

has led his team to the second address.

Both teams are trying to catch the occupants unawares.

At John's address, nobody's opening up.

Can you open the door, please? This is Brent Council with the Metropolitan Police.

We've got powers to break the door down unless you open the door.

RAPID KNOCKING

And it's the same story at the other address.

Hello, it's the police, could you open up, please?

Open the door, please.

Here we go.

-We're going to come in.

-Could you let the police in?

Eventually, both teams gain entry.

But John's team still has one obstacle in its way.

Hello.

Open the door. Police.

All right, we're in.

Police with a warrant, yeah?

With entry finally gained to both premises,

the teams can begin their search for the fake head lamp bulbs.

Soon, the team find a locked garage at the back of the property.

There's nothing in the flat, we've got to check everything.

It could be full of stuff.

The door's padlocked, so there's only one way in.

I feel like I'm in Storage Wars.

But there are no fakes here.

You win some, you lose some.

So, where are the fake bulbs?

Back in the house, John has better luck.

He's found the first signs that hopefully link this address with criminality.

Ooh, hang on. Where were they?

It's a pair of suspected fake head lamp bulbs.

Not much, but it is a start.

We've got a box of returned light bulbs, Osram ones, which are car xenons.

And on them they have written "malfunktiou",

which I presume is Polish for "not working properly".

And all the paperwork seems to go back to our main suspects.

Over at the other address,

the team led by Trading Standards officer Simon Legg

has had a positive result.

This garage is full of thousands of the potentially dangerous

fake car head lamp bulbs they've been searching for.

And there's more evidence of fakery inside the house.

It appears the bedroom upstairs is being used as an office

where there's posting, packaging materials,

business records, the computer,

the internet side of the business.

And the garage is being used as the stock room.

In there, we've got counterfeit Osram and Philips bulbs.

Jan de Visser from Philips and John Lancaster from Osram

can't wait to examine the suspected fake bulbs.

There's different types of Philips bulbs,

but that's one of the obvious ones.

I think that is the only type of Osram product I can see at the moment.

This has nothing to do with Phillips.

-I take it that's nothing to do with Osram?

-This looks very good.

The experts have confirmed that the Philips and Osram bulbs are fake,

with the Osram ones amongst the most convincing fakes ever seen by the brand holder.

The counterfeiters have definitely stepped up their game.

We've seen over the last couple of years

a big development in the quality of their packaging.

Every detail has been copied exactly,

there's not spelling mistakes you would have seen a few years ago.

The seal on the packaging is identical

to what you would find on a genuine Osram.

The fake Philips head lamp bulbs look equally impressive.

There's a lot of good quality evidence here,

it'll really help us with our investigation.

It's a great result for Trading Standards.

They've taken over 1,000 potentially dangerous fake xenon bulbs,

worth around £100,000, off the streets.

Coming up,

we put fake xenon headlamp bulbs to the test -

with some shocking results.

There's a very strong smell of burning rubber coming through.

But it is a serious hazard for the driver, as this continues.

Lots of schools now have an American-style prom for their pupils,

celebrating the ending of exams or leaving school.

They tend to be glitzy and glamorous affairs and pupils,

with the help of their parents, spend small fortunes on dresses,

suits and limousines.

The whole industry is worth tens of millions of pounds every year.

But when this arrived,

it wasn't the dream dress that its excited teenage owner expected.

Far from it.

Dresses like this one are ruining prom nights up and down the country.

End-of-year proms started in America

and now they're taking off over here.

Up to 85% of British schools now have a prom, with some pupils,

or their parents, spending over £500 each on clothes, hairdos,

spray tans and even limousine and helicopter hire.

Prom is the biggest night of the whole year

because it represents the end of GCSEs.

It's the end of everything you've been working for.

The whole year starts planning the prom from pretty much the first day of the year.

And then it goes all the way through pretty much the whole year.

Whilst shoes, hair, make-up and transport are all important parts of the prom experience,

for some girls, there's one thing that matters above all else.

The dress.

The dress is seriously important.

I mean, if it's amazing, it will make the night.

If it's not that great, it will ruin the night.

You have to find the right dress

that maybe someone else might not have.

You have to find the right colour that suits you,

you're always thinking about, oh, what do other people think?

You've got all that lovely train detail going down the back.

Tracy Beardsley owns a dress shop in Bournemouth

that supplies wedding and prom dresses.

The prom industry is worth up to 100 million in the UK,

so it's very big business.

We have a range that starts at £85

and goes right through to nearly £600,

so that's the kind of money that the girls are spending,

or their parents are spending, on dresses.

When Billie Haines's prom came round,

the first thing on her mind was what she'd wear.

She'd seen a dress online that she'd fallen in love with.

I knew that was what I wanted, like, sort of a mermaid type.

I didn't see any dress that compared to it.

It was literally like my dream dress.

The dress was reduced from over £500 to around 150,

so it seemed like a bargain.

The website promised custom fitting,

so Billie filled in her measurements and ordered it.

But when the dress finally turned up,

it wasn't at all what she was expecting.

You could see straightaway it wasn't the right colour.

There's beads falling off everywhere.

The stitching that's undone.

This has actually turned into a hole.

I can literally get my whole hand through.

It doesn't have a lot of resemblance at all, really,

to what I actually should have received.

Billie had unwittingly bought a fake version of a dress made by Blush,

a leading American prom dress designer.

Disappointed, but expecting the dress to at least fit properly,

Billie tried it on.

Around my hips it wasn't the right size,

it was just totally dangling off me, sort of thing,

not even close to my actual size.

It was just sort of, what am I going to do?

With prom just round the corner, Billie had no dress to wear.

Now desperate, she complained to the company.

They offered us 5% of what we'd paid.

Obviously, we weren't happy with that so we carried on e-mailing them

and finally they offered 10%,

but then they stopped replying after that.

We took Billie's fake Blush dress to Hannah Brady at Alexia Designs,

the stockists of the genuine dresses.

This is one of the worst fakes I've ever seen.

I think about three sequins fell off as I touched it then.

I feel dreadful for the poor girl that had to wear this to her prom.

Many a last-minute prom panic has been caused by a bad quality fake

that's not a patch on the genuine dress.

So here we have a genuine Blush prom dress

and this is a counterfeit dress.

As you can see, the quality is pretty dreadful.

The sequences are glued on, there's loose threads everywhere,

the stitching on the bodice is just completely haphazard

from jewel to jewel.

And some of the jewels are falling off or upside down.

The way they hang is completely different.

The seams are manufactured so the dress hangs properly from the hips down.

Whereas this one, you know, the seams just sit there.

Sellers of fake dresses have developed clever ways to trick

unsuspecting prom goers into thinking they're buying the real thing.

One of the biggest tricks that counterfeiters use is stealing images.

So the time and effort we've put into creating a photo shoot,

they just take the image, scrub off the logo

and shove it up on their website.

To stop their photos from being stolen by the fakers,

genuine manufacturers use special image searching software

that can identify a particular photo

by analysing the image, shapes and colours.

But the fakers are now changing the images they've stolen

from genuine websites so that the software can't identify them.

Even using Photoshop to change a model's head completely.

So this one, we have a nice photo shoot,

and then in this one, they've removed all the background image.

That model is gone, Photoshopped the model's head out,

so that's what they do to make it harder for legitimate suppliers

to put a stop to this.

Fake prom dress images like this often appear on websites designed to fool

the unsuspecting buyer.

We wanted to see how easy it is to create one,

so we went to see Mike Andrews from the National Trading Standards e-crime team.

Mike has taken up Fake Britain's challenge

to build a fake prom dress website

using the genuine Alexia Designs website as a template.

This is the code, the HTML, which makes up the website,

and then we can get to work on manipulating the files that we want

to create the fake.

We've given Mike just half an hour to build a fake prom dress website

that could be used to sell poor-quality fakes.

A quick bit of manipulation, a quick edit of the text on the website,

and it's just a matter of going in there and amending the various links.

Time's nearly up, but Mike is one step ahead.

So, that's taken me about just over 20 minutes and we've now got a fake

copy of the original website.

We've created an amended version with the Alexis name.

The original image, with the original branding and logo on it,

and the one that we doctored.

It looks very, very similar.

It is quite easy to create something that really does appear quite genuine.

Now, I can get this uploaded online and quickly start making

large sums of money.

A consumer looking at that site

would probably think they're looking at the genuine website.

Billie Haines is just one of thousands of teenagers who have been duped by

fake prom dress website like this.

For her, it was almost too late.

With prom fast approaching,

she'd lost £150 on a fake dress with a terrible fit.

Luckily, she had friends who could fix it.

She took three weeks to do it because of how badly made it was.

And then she couldn't even fully fix it.

She had to take off 100 sequins, just to make it fit properly.

Billie did go to the prom,

but it was far from the experience she dreamed of.

I did have a nice time

but it was just being paranoid about what it looked like,

because it kept rising up as well.

So all night I was just like pulling it down and tucking it in and trying

to have a nice time while fiddling all night.

Everyone wants to have that sort of fairy tale moment with a prom dress,

stepping out of a limo and everyone saying, "Wow, you look amazing!"

And you just can't get that with a counterfeit dress.

Earlier on Fake Britain,

we saw how officers from Brent Trading Standards successfully seized

over 1,000 potentially dangerous fake xenon car head lamp bulbs.

Lots of fake bulbs here.

A lot of good quality evidence, it'll really help us with our investigation.

Michael Cadelski found out about the dangers of fake head lamps

when he needed replacement bulbs for his family car.

One bulb had blown and because they come in different colour temperatures,

I thought it would be wise to change both bulbs at the same time,

to make sure they were exactly the same colour.

New xenon bulbs direct from Volvo cost about £100 each.

So Michael decided to look for a better deal online.

When I secured two of them for £68, I thought I was quids in.

Michael decided to buy from a British-based seller for added peace of mind.

But when the bulbs took longer than expected to arrive,

Michael began to get suspicious, so he contacted the seller.

In complaining to the guy, he said, you know,

"I told you they come from Poland,"

and it really clearly wasn't stated on the website at all

that they were coming from Poland. It was stating UK.

So I was a little bit uncertain about them.

Finally, the bulbs arrived.

They looked OK. So Michael installed them in his car and thought no more

about it.

Got home at about half-past five

and as I pulled up against the garage door,

I noticed that one of the bulbs was out.

Turned the ignition off, turned it back on again, still no light,

got out the car, checked the bulbs,

and the left-hand bulb was not working.

Michael was due to go on holiday before dawn the next day.

He would need working headlights to drive to the airport in the dark.

It was quite detrimental because we were travelling at four o'clock in

the morning, Saturday morning and I found this out

at six o'clock on a Friday.

With just hours to go before his flight,

Michael had to search for a replacement bulb.

Luckily, he found one and was able to drive to the airport.

But when he returned from holiday,

he took a closer look at the bulbs that had failed.

So, I took the back off and noticed that the circuit board was very,

very different from the circuit board from the original,

which obviously alerted me to the fact

that they were most probably fake.

Michael sent photos of the bulbs to manufacturers Osram.

They confirmed that they were indeed fake.

It could have caused us an awful lot of problems, really.

If it had gone in the middle of the night when I was driving,

down country lanes or whatever, that would have been detrimental as well.

Michael was left out of pocket by a fake xenon bulb

but this is not just about money.

The fakes can pose serious safety risks to other road users.

Phillips is a leading xenon head lamps manufacturer.

This factory in Germany is the heart of their xenon head lamps business.

Sales director Richard Armstrong is concerned about the safety of the

fake bulbs on the market.

If you fit a counterfeit bulb with a dramatic increase in glare,

that represents a serious hazard for oncoming drivers.

Car headlights are manufactured to meet high safety standards.

They need to shine as much bright light as possible onto the road ahead

at just the right angle to avoid dazzling oncoming drivers.

Richard is going to run a test to show how the fake bulbs perform.

First, he'll test a genuine bulb.

As we can see through this demonstration,

the black line represents the horizon, the cut-off line,

and the red line represents the legal limit which the light must not

exceed, because when it exceeds the red line,

that is when glare starts to occur.

And as we can see, with a genuine bulb fitted,

it meets all the legal requirements to ensure that no dazzling of

oncoming traffic can occur.

But, when the fake bulb is tested, the difference is stark.

As we can see with the counterfeit bulb fitting,

it's very clearly exceeding the line dramatically.

That increases glare.

What this means, by fitting a counterfeit bulb,

every time you go out in your car at night time and you switch on your

lights, you're in serious danger of dazzling other drivers and,

as a consequence, increasing the likelihood of causing a serious accident.

Blinding oncoming drivers is just one of the many hazards posed by

fake headlight bulbs.

The dangers of fitting a counterfeit bulb range from electrical problems

on the vehicle, which may result in airbags being detonated unnecessarily

and, in extreme cases, we've seen vehicles catch fire

as a result of a counterfeit bulb being fitted.

Richard's team was recently sent a fake bulb bought by a British motorist.

They're going to run another test, this time an electrical test.

And outdoors, for safety reasons.

The customer's reported damage to the vehicle,

so we're not sure what the results of the test are going to produce.

The results are swift and conclusive.

There's a very strong smell of burning rubber coming through.

The fake bulb is overheating and smoking dangerously.

Out of sight under the bonnet of someone's car,

this fake bulb would have continued to heat up.

This represents a significant danger to the driver of the car.

Because it can lead, then, to a full-blown fire.

The hazard it presents to the vehicle driver

is a serious danger.

This micro-SD card is a great digital storage device.

It's small, but it hold over 40,000 of your treasured photos or 24 hours

of home video. But if you had all your precious moments recorded on this,

you might regret it, because it's a fake!

How safe are your memories?

From CompactFlash cards to secure Digital or SD cards,

we all want portable storage these days.

The more we take photos with our cameras and phones,

the more we need these kinds of things to store the data on.

And it's a big business,

with the global market for SD cards set to reach over £14 billion

within a few years.

But, as Tim Lawrence from Derbyshire discovered,

the fakers have inserted themselves into the portable storage market, too.

Tim loves cycling around the great outdoors and video recording his

adventures using a small video camera that records onto micro-SD cards.

Tend to record the footage

on the more interesting parts of the route.

For example, if you're going down a gnarly, rocky descent,

you can actually see, oh, that's where I made that mistake.

Tim needed a new, high-capacity 64GB micro-SD card card,

so he went online.

He found one for around £45 which was a good deal at the time.

The card arrived, and it looked absolutely fine,

so Tim started filming.

A few months later, he was riding and filming a particularly challenging

mountain bike route.

Afterwards, Tim took the micro-SD card straight home and plugged it

into his computer.

We'll try and see what we recorded.

Clicked open.

And basically it came up with that - error, can't play.

There's a problem the extension format.

And what you've recorded, you've lost.

Try as he might, Tim couldn't recover the footage, so he called SanDisk,

who he thought had manufactured the micro-SD card.

They informed me through the information I provided

that it was a non-genuine one.

Tim was shocked to discover that he had in fact bought a fake card.

The packaging and the card that was enclosed in the packaging was that

good a copy

that, at first glance, you wouldn't realise that it was a copy.

Tim had no chance of spotting the difference between the fake card

and the fake adapter that it came with and the genuine item.

But there is a man who can.

Mike Montgomery is a data recovery expert who regularly deals with

people who've lost precious photos and other important information.

It can be very devastating. if the data can't be recovered.

We showed Mike Tim's fake micro-SD card.

First, he examines the outside.

All right, the first thing I can see is that this is

a very strange hologram on it.

Meaningless. It's very suspicious.

Tim was unable to play his footage back after recording it on to his fake card,

and Mike wants to find out why, so he's going to run a test.

What I did was I took an old photograph of Daisy, one of our dogs,

and I copied it until the memory card was full.

The fake card is filled to its maximum capacity.

after a few thousand repetitions, all of a sudden,

we've got corrupt files.

You see here that these files here

are totally corrupt.

That one there has started to break up about halfway through.

And then, from there,

there's a folder there that has absolutely nothing in it.

A genuine memory card should warn you when it's full up.

The card won't allow you to record anything else,

and everything you've recorded up to that point is safely stored.

That's not the case with Tim's fake card.

It's constantly being overwritten, overwritten, overwritten.

And that corrupts, and leads to data lost.

Mike's discovered that the card has started recording over itself,

creating new files that are corrupt while deleting old ones.

That's why Tim couldn't play back his footage.

But Mike's noticed something else as well.

On this memory card, we should have 36,600 photos on here.

But actually, all that we've got,

9,120

and we can see here that it

says the total size on there is 15.2 Gigabytes.

So that is nothing like the 64GB that's stamped on the outside.

With the help of some clever software,

this fake card will tell your computer and you that it's a more expensive,

high-capacity 64GB card.

But in reality it's only 16GB.

A much cheaper, smaller card.

It's an easy mark-up and profit margin for the sellers of fake cards.

If you save your data on a fake SD card,

it might be the last time you ever see it.

With fake devices, the chances of recovery drop drastically.

Because, in many cases, the data just doesn't exist any more.

That's all from Fake Britain.

Goodbye.