Online sellers are peddling fake cosmetics with impunity
Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Tiktok Shop and Vinted all told us that they strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and have measures in place to detect and deal with them. However, fake beauty products have previously been found to contain dangerous and carcinogenic chemicals, including arsenic, lead and mercury, according to the Anti Counterfeiting Group. It's horrifying to think that shoppers could be applying these substances to their skin.
How has this been allowed to happen? Which? thinks the answer is twofold: a consumer enforcement system that is not fit for purpose and a lack of clear responsibilities for marketplaces to ensure the safety of their products. The role of Trading Standards is to enforce laws that protect consumers. However, our recent freedom of information request found that Trading Standards departments are severely overstretched, and many are deprioritising consumer harms such as counterfeiting.
These services, based within local authorities, are in the impossible position of enforcing hundreds of consumer protection laws — on the high street and online — without the resources to meet this challenge. Spotting counterfeit cosmetics is by no means straightforward. The sophistication of some counterfeits and the complexity of online marketplaces highlights why Trading Standards need to police them effectively.
The UK is finally taking the necessary steps to update the regulatory obligations on online marketplaces. This week, after years of campaigning by Which?, the Product Regulation and Metrology Act gained Royal Assent; paving the way for new rules to tackle the sale of unsafe products. However, new rules are only as good as their enforcement.
Without clear consequences, it's difficult to see where the deterrent lies for dodgy sellers. A better functioning enforcement system would deter many counterfeits from being listed, which would help prevent shoppers being exposed to misleading and dangerous products. If the government is serious about tackling crime and supporting responsible businesses, it must get a grip on this.
Sue Davies is Which? head of consumer protection policy
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BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
TikTok Labubu trend exploited by criminals with dangerous fakes
At an anonymous industrial estate on the outskirts of London, a queue of police vans and empty lorries block the usual flow of lunchtime are here to seize fake Labubu dolls. Thousands of weeks of work, intelligence that started at a corner shop in south Wales has led Trading Standards officers to a labyrinth of rooms hidden above this retail they estimate millions of pounds worth of fake products are piled up, floor to ceiling, but what interests them most are the fluffy, mischievous-looking dolls at the centre of a global TikTok craze. According to Forbes, the popularity of Labubu dolls helped parent company Pop Mart more than double its total revenue to £1.33bn ($1.81bn) last are wanted by children and adults alike, with some telling us they queued for hours or travelled across the country just to secure an authentic one. However, messages seen by BBC News also suggest scalpers may be buying hundreds of genuine products at a time to resell them at a profit, with authorities reporting a "flood" of counterfeits entering the Force has seized hundreds of thousands from UK ports in the past few months, meanwhile officers at the London industrial estate believe the dolls grinning up at them from the crates hide a darker secret."The head comes off. The feet will pull off," explained Rhys Harries from Trading Standards, as one literally falls apart in his hands. Mr Harries first saw dolls like this after raiding a corner shop almost 200 miles away in Swansea, before tracing them back here."I've found them in the bags where their eyes are coming off, their hands will come off." Mr Harries' team use a plastic tube, shaped like a child's throat, to measure how dangerous objects are - if it fits, it is a choking hazard."These [parts] will all get stuck and then potentially cause choking," he said. Mum-of-one Jade said she "100%" agreed the fakes were a choking hazard after some fell apart shortly after giving them to her 34-year-old from Caerphilly knew she had bought fakes - sometimes nicknamed Lafufus - for her son Harri's sixth birthday as she could not justify the cost of the authentic she felt "obliged to get him one" after all his friends got their own and found knock-offs for just over £10, compared to some genuine ones costing £ just a few hours into Harri's birthday, Jade said the keyring came off, followed by part of one of the feet a few days Harri was swinging his new toy the hook came off the keyring, only for Jade to spot it in his said "luckily" her son was old enough to tell her about his toy falling apart, but she warned things could be different for younger children. According to the Intellectual Property Office, the rush by criminals to get fakes to market often results in dangerous materials being used."Counterfeiting is the second largest source of criminal income worldwide, second only to drug trafficking," said Kate Caffery, deputy director of intelligence and law enforcement."It's in the interests of these criminal organisations to respond quickly to trends to maximise it, to get on the back of it and make the most money that they possibly can."So that's why we see it happening so quickly and a complete disregard for safety concerns." Ms Caffery dismissed claims these fakes were made in the same factories or using the same materials as the real thing as "absolutely not true", adding that they "could be made from anything".These range from the inferior to the dangerous, including toxic plastics, chemicals, and small parts that aren't properly attached "that can then pose a chocking hazard".Although fake Labubus are still relatively new to the market, investigators know from previous cases involving counterfeit toys that they can be made with banned chemicals, including some linked to say most counterfeit products, including Labubus, can be traced to China, Hong Kong or Turkey and people are being warned to look out for "too good to be true" pricing or packaging that feels cheap and flimsy. TikToker Meg Goldberger, 27, is no stranger to collecting in a market filled with has about 250 Jellycat plush toys, alongside her new collection of 12 Labubu dolls."The more people talked about it and the harder they became to get, the more I needed them. That's why I now have 12," she pretty early into her search, Ms Goldberger said she realised the odds were stacked against her in her hunt for the real thing. She said she spent about 12 hours over several days waiting for Pop Mart store's TikTok live video, where Labubus are released for sale at a set time, just like gig tickets."It used to be they sold out within like a minute. It's now like literally two seconds. You can't get your hands on them," she she opted to find someone reselling them online, but also discovered why they may have been selling out so she asked an eBay reseller for proof the Big Into Energy Labubu series she was interested in was genuine, Ms Goldberger was sent "a screenshot of what could have been like almost 200 orders of Labubus". "These people will sit at home and somehow robots hack the websites and bulk buy them, which is why they go so quickly. Then they'll resell them." Mr Harries said a selection of fake Labubus would be taken from London back to Swansea for use as rest will be stored as evidence at a secret location before being either recycled or destroyed."These were going everywhere," he said."There were invoice books with them and they were going all across the UK. It's a national issue."Pop Mart has been asked to comment.
Times
a day ago
- Times
Organised crime is suffocating our high streets
Time was, organised crime was something you only saw on TV. You'd read about drug busts and murders in the paper, but it was always in faraway places. Now, 'OC' as the police call it, is on our local high streets — upfront and in our faces — and it's making us angry. I'm talking, of course, about the surging numbers of shops selling counterfeit tobacco and vapes, Turkish-style barbers and car washes. The extent — the brazenness — of the criminality is shocking, undermining legitimate shops nearby and fuelling anti-immigrant populism. I recently spent a day with trading standards officers in Hull as they hunted for illegal tobacco with sniffer dogs. In all but one of the five shops they raided that day, they seized thousand of pounds-worth of fake fags and vapes. They knew they'd find it because, along with 80 other premises in the city, they'd busted them all before. They also knew that within days — if not hours — of us leaving, the crims would be back in business, plying their corner of the £5 billion-a-year fake tobacco trade. As we travelled in our unmarked cars from one job to the next, men standing outside shops would look startled and pick up their phones. 'Spotters,' the officers explained: they'd recognised our vehicles and were calling through to other shops in the area to warn them. Behind every illegal cigarette and roll-up lies a trail of misery: the trafficked slaves assembling the product in British and European towns; the women workers forced into sex with the bosses; the smuggled migrants toiling for hours under the floorboards of the shops, passing up hidden cigs to the till staff. The gangs pollute neighbourhoods, too. Outside Dodo's Mini Mart in Hull, whose roof was so riddled with hollowed out hidey holes for contraband it looked fit to fall in, rangy looking men gathered. As the officers carried out evidence bags the size of bin liners full of illegal tobacco, some shouted abuse at us, pointing their camera phones at our faces and number plates. Locals, perhaps, employed by the gangs to restock the hidey-holes with fake cigs once we'd left? Or simply smokers who like buying tobacco for a third of the price of the real thing? Contraband shops are antisocial behaviour magnets — be that children buying the cheap cigs and hanging around outside, drug dealing, or even violence. For local businesses, they are a disaster. Legitimate corner shops' tobacco sales vanish once word gets out that a £16 pack of 'Marlboro' is going for £4.50 a few doors down. And, for every regular smoker they lose, that's a string of lost sales of confectionery, crisps or fizzy drinks the customer used to buy with the fags. Illicit shops further damage honest rivals by subsidising price cuts on confectionery and groceries with the thousands of pounds a week they make selling fake baccy. Not to mention the tax, minimum wage and national insurance they avoid. • A tiny town, 14 salons. Why are barbers taking over the high street? Pretty soon, the law-abiding retailer will give up the lease and move on, leaving yet another boarded up shop for the leaching gangs to move into. Before you know it, you're left with a carnage of dodgy minimarts, empty shops and barbers of ill-repute, staffed by a ready supply of migrant workers. As families stay away, the high street asphyxiates. Can't we keep these criminals out of our once-bustling high streets? Of course, we can. We just need the commitment to do it. First off, trading standards officers should be given more powers quickly to shut lawbreaking premises, and for far longer than the three-month orders currently used. A year should do it. Currently, most don't bother as the legal process is so laborious and expensive it would evaporate their budgets. And, if we're going to ratchet up the punishments they hand out, we need to give them more muscle to deal with the blowback. Trading standards are not an arm of the police; they are council officials, there to check butchers and bakers aren't fiddling the weights and measures. Yet we're sending them out, armed with nothing but a smile and a clipboard, to tackle organised crime. If we're going to get tough, we need to put officers working in this area into a permanent partnership with the police. They're just too vulnerable now; I'm told one in the North East was threatened that she'd be kidnapped and blinded if her team doesn't stop their raids. They work in pairs to keep them safe, but one tells me his right-hand man is a 17-year-old apprentice — barely old enough for a shave in a Turkish barbershop. We should also get tough with the landlords who allow this crime to go on in their properties, lured by the higher rents the bad guys offer to pay. Warn them, then prosecute for owning a house of ill-repute. Enforce the 'know your customer' rules on their estate agents, with spot checks to see if they know the origins of the funds of these dubious businesses. Trading standards find the same dodgy agents crop up time and again in their investigations, placing crooks into vacant shops. Shut them down. The criminals would not have arrived, of course, if high streets weren't already on their knees. Online shopping and out-of-town retail parks devastated them long before the barbers and vape shops invaded. Successive governments have tried to stem the rot, and Labour had a go last week with its small business plan. There were fine ideas: 13,000 new police officers on high streets, lower business rates for SMEs, and cheaper parking. But even if you believed the promises, they didn't deal with the main problem. Post the internet and global financial crisis, there are simply too many shops. If we can't let them out to honest retailers, we should transform them into the things people need: NHS dentists and physiotherapists, affordable homes. Then the gangs could be kept at bay.
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
Shopper from Cornwall told to return items to China for refund
A shopper has described her "shocking experience" with an online clothing company after she said she was told she would need to post return items to Griffiths, from Newquay, Cornwall, ordered what was listed as a "stylish khaki jumpsuit" from Mova London but instead a cream two piece requested a full refund but she said she was told by the firm she had to send the items to China, which would have cost more than she paid for them. Despite its name, she questioned whether the firm was based in the London said it "understands there has been some concern regarding the order" but it did not respond to questions about its return policy or whether it was UK-based. Ms Griffiths, who believed she was ordering from a firm based in the UK, said she was told her items were being shipped from China when they failed to arrive within five the items arrived three weeks later, she said the items were "not khaki but cream", while the material was "flimsy" and the "fit was wrong".She said she asked to return the items, but was told she could keep them and have anything from between 10%-40% experience left her feeling "conned", she said. Kat Cereda, from Which?, said more shoppers were being misled by websites that appear to be UK-based."They sell items that generally disappoint and are extremely hard to get a refund from," she Griffiths used charge back through her bank and received a full London said it considered the case to be closed "as the matter has already been addressed through the appropriate channels and resolved via the customer's bank".
