Optician sold rip-off straighteners

An optician tried to make £120,000 from selling fake ceramic hair straighteners on the internet.

Upkar Gill bought the fakes from China for as little as £6 each and sold them on the internet for up to £80 a pair.

Wolverhampton Crown Court heard yesterday that the 52-year-old owner of Avmal Opticians in Smethwick High Street got an initial batch of 200 that went so quickly he wanted 2,000 more. Prosecutor Mr Jonathon Challinor said: "That would have cost him £18,000 and brought a gross profit of £120,000."

Gill was selling so many of the fakes on auction site ebay that a team from Sandwell Trading Standards specialising in internet scams was alerted.

Recorder Stephen Campbell gave Gill, who admitted possessing counterfeit goods for sale, a nine-month jail sentence suspended for a year, and ordered him to pay £2,000 costs and hand over £9,000 proceeds of crime by the summer or be locked up in jail for six months.

The court heard that businessman used the James Bond alias 007 together with the initials USG as his user identity name.

But investigators quickly traced the sales to his opticians where the office computer carried tell-tale details of the illegal transactions on its home page.

Gill had only 42 of his original 200-strong batch left and was reckoned to have made £9,000 profit from selling the cheap Chinese imitations as GHD Mark 3 and 4 originals that are normally priced around £120.

Mr Challinor said: "The goods he was selling were inferior and there was a potential danger of short circuiting because the wires were not properly insulated but there is no proof of this actually happening."

Gill, who was said to live at the same address as his opticians, claimed that he was put on to the racket by his 14-year-old son.

Mr Phillip Bradley, defending, insisted: "He showed a severe degree of naivety rather than sophisticated criminality.

"His son saw the profit in it and he did not originally realise the products were counterfeit although he now accepts they were."