Vapes: How easy is it to buy an illegal one?

Aug 15, 2023

Illegal vapes are being seized at an unprecedented level, and shops selling them have been described by trading standards officers as the biggest threat on the UK's high streets. But how easy are they to get hold of and what is being done to prevent them from reaching the shelves?

I'm walking down Oxford Street in the heart of London's West End.

In the last few weeks alone, counterfeit goods worth £140,000, including illegal-strength vape pens, were seized here by Westminster Council Trading Standards and Met Police officers.

I'm going to see how easy it is to get my hands on one.

I've entered a shop which has a bright wall of colourful vapes stacked up high on shelves. Before long, I spot a vape that doesn't meet UK packaging standards. I pick it up and start talking with a shop worker.

I ask if he has anything stronger. He says it'll cost me.

I'm led to the back of the store where the worker lifts a blanket to reveal a box on the floor containing tonnes of oversized and illegal high-strength vapes.

He starts listing the nicotine strengths, and I'm sold a vape for £50 which has 5% nicotine and a capacity of about 4,000 puffs. He also gives me another illegal vape for free.

The legal limit for a disposable device is 20mg (2%) - around 600 puffs.

I'm not even asked my age. Although I'm 21, I do look quite young and am used to being asked to show my ID all the time.

Next, I'm meeting Phil Jenkins, a senior London Trading Standards officer who seized one million illegal vapes with his Ports and Borders team at Heathrow Airport last year.

I've arranged to meet Phil at a secret location which stores thousands of illegal vapes, away from the airport. As I enter the vault, I'm confronted with a flood of colourful vapes, similar to the ones I saw at the shop. This time, though, they're being held in evidence bags.

"All of these are illegal vapes; nothing in this room is legal," says Phil.

"These have all been seized from retailers in and around London in the last week. The vapes are all essentially being manufactured and are coming from one country - that's China. They make legal vapes there, too"

"They can go anywhere around the world: places with low tax regimes, places with low enforcement or areas where there's been a spike in demand. They go everywhere very fast."

This video can not be played

Vaping: Inside the secret vault housing thousands of seized illegal vapes

Phil explains that bringing the goods in via Heathrow is expensive - and they are intended to be sold quickly.

He outlines some of the dangers associated with these products.

"If you absorb too much nicotine, it could cause serious harm. You don't know how safe the lithium batteries are; you just don't know what's in them," he says.

According to Westminster City Council, the raids earlier this month take the total worth of fake goods seized from Oxford Street's sweet and souvenir shops to more than £1m in the last 15 months.

After the raids, council leader Adam Hug said the authority was dealing "with a sophisticated and determined racket that exploits UK legal loopholes to trade from shop lets", adding that it was also chasing £9m in unpaid business rates through the courts.

So what happens to the vapes after they are seized? A company that destroys them on behalf of the authorities told the BBC that they were extremely hard to dispose of responsibly in large quantities.

So much so, the company prefers not to named for fear being overloaded with more than it can cope with.

Once seized, the team will send the illegal vapes to a secure location to be destroyed sustainably.

The vapes are then disassembled, with the lithium batteries separated and crushed into fine powders for re-use.

The cartridges are separated from vessels, cleaned and recycled, too.

While they do contain nicotine - the substance that makes people addicted to smoking - vapes and e-cigarettes are considered far safer than normal cigarettes because they do not contain harmful tobacco, or produce dangerous tar or carbon monoxide from tobacco smoke.

However, health experts say they are not risk-free, and more research is needed to find out about their potential effects over many years.

Follow BBC London on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Send your story ideas to [email protected]

Thousands of vapes seized from Oxford Street shops

Illegal vape sales are High Street's biggest threat

Market flooded by unsafe vapes aimed at children

London Trading Standards