The Truth About Temu | Dispatches | Channel 4 Documentaries

was a pound even if you lived under a rock, it looks like the new shopping app would find a way to show you its eye-catching ads. U's advertising strategy is practically an online blitz. It costs just 89 C less than $10. It is one of the fastest growing retailers the world has ever seen. I downloaded. I'm saving a lot of money. A quarter of the British population have downloaded the app since its launch less than 2 years ago, with 500 million users worldwide. Teu Hall, yes Queen, there is literally nothing you can't follow here, its meteoric rise is down to one thing: it was dirt cheap, it was super cheap, but can we really trust those little price tags?

My 10 kilo Char for a walk, well, it lasts like 3 seconds, are we in? control what we spend on it T's slogan is buy like a billionaire half way from a gambling app that is crazy and those cheap products are even safe to use it is very very toxic at worst this electric shock could cause death was launched in september 2022 teu, what is that? It is an online marketplace. The things that are available in your cover every possible type of product you can imagine, from the sublime to the ridiculous. This 8 light washing machine is amazing, so I have these amazing items on my Baby, I bought him a plate where he can take his morning fruits.

Jod is one of the 15 million Brits who have downloaded Teemu and it's all about rock bottom prices, like me. Jody is a mother of a young child and shares her latest purchases with her online. Next, Teemu will pay you up to £1,000 to make videos showcasing her products, so did you bring enough tenu? So I think I brought probably 60, maybe more items, you can get all this stuff for a really cheap price, there are discounts. everywhere, so I definitely got hooked on that, so I bought this cardigan that, you know, is a neutral color. I mean, it's not like it's fresh off the runway at Paris Fashion Week, but for the price it's cozy, but obviously yeah, it's not like that.

Gucci quality obviously not and you know it's the cost of living crisis and I think everyone should be able to afford simple things like clothes, vacuum cleaners and cleaning products. The reason teu is so cheap is because they don't make any of the products. Instead, you sell, you provide the online platform for thousands of Chinese companies to sell their products to merchants you sell on the ship directly to the customer, eliminating middlemen and making huge savings, which means that the parent company of tea now worth approximately 170 billion tea businesses. The model might explain the rock-bottom prices, but I've found evidence of complaints about the quality and safety of some of their products, which is why there's a woman here who says her house burned down after a cheap tablet she brought with her caught fire. . horrible experience, there is another story here about an 11 year old girl who appears to have a terrible burn on her hand when she used teamu glue to apply something fake, so in both cases teamu did not indicate if their products were responsible for the incident, but They assure customers that they carry out rigorous quality checks, but after seeing these cases I have some questions, so I will order a variety of their best-selling items and take a look at the quality and test those that should be safe, It actually is, so I'm going to do a variety of things, like products that I'm interested in, as well as skincare things, some cosmetics.

Maybe you have a little boy, so things that might be useful for him, a floating cow costume. I've been looking for one of them for a while, in fact, here we go, a beautiful little blue dress for what you pay. I guess this is probably what you expect. It has just been gun glued to the front with pieces of thread hanging from it. It's exciting, I thought about Christmas. They are amazing products for babies and children should be safe, so I bought this baby safety walker for £268. The advert for the baby carrier says it is suitable for children up to 3 years old, which means it should support an average weight of 15kg, so I put it to the test in the local park.

It's like a baby walker that can hold up to 15 kilos and you should be able to support the weight of a baby with it, so let's see how we get on, my son. Taking my 10 kilo son for a walk that lasted about 3 seconds, 5 kilos less than he was supposed to be, it's obviously a bit ridiculous to try this in a park with some sandbags that are meant to be my children , but the point is if people buy them and expect to put their children in them at the advertised weight, then they trust that advertising to be accurate and they trust that these products are safe, he told us that an independent laboratory test showed that The product maintained a weight of 15 kg for 2 hours without problems.

However, in the interest of security, we will conduct additional review before deciding whether to allow the merchant to resume their sale. There are some things you simply wouldn't need to risk when the time comes. to buy at a hugely reduced price and above all that is that you know certain things for my son and also safety equipment, so I took a look at you to see if they had a lot of safety equipment there and I managed to find some carbines for climbers and Los Construction workers use carbines to connect ropes to their harnesses and the equipment is responsible for supporting the majority of the climbers' weight compared to carbines available elsewhere.

These are a third of the typical price. The carbines were advertised as certified by the uiaa, a climbing organization that certifies. mountaineering equipment I traveled to Manchester to show the carabiners to someone from the organisation, so we got these carabiners from teamu which is an online retailer. Is there anything you notice when looking at the carabiners? There is a uiaa brand but the first. What really stands out is the fact that we are missing a manufacturer or brand on the carbine, so although the carbine does not have a manufacturer marked, the packaging that was supplied with a carbine does, but without that brand or manufacturer marked.

At Carbine we have no way to link this carbine to a manufacturer or any safety certificates it may have. The UIA would never have its mark on a rifle or certified product that did not have the manufacturer's mark. Here we go. I also found other products for sale on Teemu that are marked with the labels of safety certification organizations I am talking to, an institute that tests and certifies electrical products. Your safety label is on two pliers that I bought from Teemu, as well as the advertisement and packaging of these products that you have provided are not certified by the VDE Institute, in addition, the two pliers are advertised in teu with images of VDE certificates next to it, but those certificates were not issued to the seller whose name appears in the documentation that can be seen in the photos of the ads.

The certificates appear to be forged according to VDA. The certificate was a copy. It was illegal. They forged the original certificate and simply canceled the name. on the certificate with their own names this will definitely have consequences for this manufacturer, if the certification is not correct, the insulation of these portable tools may not be done correctly and the result could be an electric shock and, at worst, cases, this electric shock could cause death, so I also found some medical products that say that. have been certified by the FDA the FDA is the US government department that regulates medical equipment some products are advertised as FDA certified or FDA approved, suggesting that they have been evaluated by the FDA department He told me that he has not certified any of the products that I sent them because he does not issue certificates and he has not approved any of the products that I brought to them.

Teamus' third party conduct policy states that suppliers cannot sell items that could be harmful to their customers, but I am finding more and more evidence that they are not living up to that promise, fortunately their approval is something they advertise. you know consumers should absolutely care so if there is any chance of this failing you as a consumer you absolutely need to know that it is really concerning that any of these products are available anywhere. Timu says sellers on its platform must comply with UK trading laws and regulations, but taking action against sellers is proving difficult if you have brick-and-mortar or retail stores.

In the UK, where UK regulators and UK trading standards, for example, can access and enforce them, one thing is that if you have sellers based outside the UK or outside Europe, it's very difficult. apply them against someone who is not within your territory. jurisdiction, but what about the other products I bought at teu? I want to know what they are made of. The UK has strict laws governing the amounts of toxic chemicals allowed in products, so I will be sending five pieces of jewelery and clothing. I purchased a toxicology lab to test how concerned you are about these results and the results could pose a significant danger to buyers.

I am very concerned that they do not meet any guidelines for the level of toxic heavy metals, if possible. I bought this without showing its age, that's a real surprise. I am saving a lot of money by spending it on

temu

online shopping sensation. Teemu has been encouraging me and millions of people to shop like a billionaire with its animated ads focusing on its cheap prices, but I want to investigate if there's something else going on with the technology behind TEU that's enticing customers to come back to it. over and over again and I find it fascinating how easily I find myself drawn to the teamu app.

It has all this stuff like spinning wheels to win prizes and Flash Sales Offers, it even has a section where you can play, it's gamifying the shopping experience, but on steroids they are engaging. The aesthetics of their T cartoons look like they are fun and it feels like everything the app does is designed to try to hold you back. Entertained and stimulated and on the app for as long as possible, apps and games have a measurable effect on the brain, so I commissioned an expert in brain wave technology to measure my pleasure responses to Amazon because it's also an online marketplace that sells a wide range. of products and a gambling game, so it's just an EEG headset that will pick up electrical signals from your brain that will allow us to monitor what's going on inside your head.

Trey's headset is recording my brain activity to measure how stimulated I feel while Using these three apps, I will use each one for 10 minutes and for the shopping apps, I will buy the same number of products from the same categories, such as clothing and clothes for the home, the more stimulated my brain is, the more likely I will be. to stay in the app and use it more often when you're ready to start browsing, just nod and I'll make a note of the time, okay and let's record. I'm very used to the Amazon app. I guess it becomes kind of second nature.

YES I put some things I really like in the basket and bought them. Well, I'm going to pause the session, so now I'm ready to take a look. The team puts it together to see how it compares, okay, so I'm going to buy some things now. The order was placed after 10 minutes in each of the shopping applications. Move on to the betting application. Okay, now I'm just playing roulette. I think I've only won one £140 22 40 You don't have much time to decide where you want to place your B so I feel quite stressed when I have to decide Oh, I think I might have won again, yes, one80 Well, we've got some results in the app that sits between the two, so what we were seeing was more of a sort of top-to-bottom journey similar to the game, with the game being a constant increase over the time period. whereas with timu you got quite a bit of pleasure and then you fell off a little bit, but the average pleasure was high throughout, but it definitely seems to give you more gains in the short term, so you think there might be a risk of addiction.

For the team you're on, I think there might be a risk if you constantly get these little spikes of pleasure, it's a lot harder to get out of them. It's really interesting that it's halfway between Amazon and a gambling app, like halfway to a gambling app. That's crazy Teemu's clever technology clearly had an effect on me and that may help explain why it became so popular in such a short time, but for Ian Duncan Smith the line between successful marketing strategies and gambling is blurred. clear enough in current legislation. wants to investigate whether shopping apps like TeemuThey should be better regulated, so I think the teamu system is based on betting technology, so instead of betting per se on the outcome of something, they are actually betting on cheaper products.

Much like the way gambling companies work to get you addicted to their products during a cost of living crisis. Low price ads are very attractive, but if the Teemu app is addictive then we may be buying more than we need. There are other ways. Teemu encourages users to continue using the application. They had an offer that encouraged people to exchange details with their friends in exchange for 50 credits or even vouchers, but there was more to the giveaway than meets the eye: you were handing over a staggering amount of personal information that Teemu said he would keep forever, and that he would do whatever he wanted with things like your name, where you live, your likeness, your voice, and that made people say, wait a second, what is Teemu doing with all this data and why was it necessary Ian Duncan Smith has been long concernedthe dangers of british customer data in the hands of china-based tech companies the chinese government demands teu data from any chinese company under the national security law they are obliged to hand it over well i think almost All these companies, like timu, are Data collectors, one of their main purposes is to filter data, first of all collect it and then pass it on to the intelligence services.

The intelligence services in China will then look to see if there is anyone, anything of interest, anyone of interest, any job that anyone is in. Interestingly, the government's job is to defend people from that type of theft of their personal data. Okay, this teu's recovery process is slow and they claim their data practices are clearly disclosed in their privacy policy, but I'm trying to access that policy. on your website and it is proving difficult every time I click on the terms of use, the terms and conditions appear and then it automatically redirects me to the login page.

Alarm bells are ringing, why don't they let you read the terms and conditions. Under UK consumer rights laws, even overseas-based companies that market their products to customers in the UK must make their consumer policies visible. privacy, so they may be infringing A few weeks ago I bought a range of teu's best-selling products at 27 silver necklace, a 297 gold chain and a boy's jacket for £19 teu says it guarantees that third-party sellers will never They must allow products that may cause harm on their platform, but concerns have been raised about product safety, so I want to try some products myself in the UK. has strict regulations on the amount of certain chemicals allowed in products, even if they are sold by foreign companies.

I sent my purchases to an accredited toxicology laboratory and asked one of the UK's leading chemists to analyze the results this way. This is an analysis of a gold chain and if you look down here at the clasp and the trigger, we have here 70 milligrams per kilogram of lead and here 26.7 milligrams per kilogram of lead, which is much higher than what is allowed in These things, heavy metals, are strictly regulated because of the health risks they pose. Can you explain to me what lead is or what danger it can pose if it is in a product like this when lead builds up in the body, often over months or years, even if it is small?

Amounts of lead can cause serious health problems. Reduced sperm count. Spontaneous abortion. Still, the gold chain I bought had twice as much lead as UK regulations allow and 27 times more cadmium, a metal that, with long-term exposure, has been linked to kidney damage and bone degradation. This last example is a child's jacket and again, if we look at the antimony, there are 82.5 Mig per kg in the brown material and 33.6 Mig per kilo in the leather part of the jacket, so these levels really high levels of antimony are absolutely unacceptable. Professor Harwood said Of most concern is antimony, although there is no legislation restricting the amounts that can be used on clothing over a long period of time, this could have very negative effects on the body, particularly the system. highly strung.

Professor Harwood found 10 times more lead in a sample of my silver necklace than regulations allow. None of these products contained a list of ingredients. How concerned are you about these results? Well, I'm very concerned and children under six years old are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning and this can have all kinds of effects on mental development uh physical development and pregnant women it can cause stillbirth and it can cause neurological problems in both young and old. greater. Teu said our tests confirmed that some elements exceeded acceptable limits for heavy metals. These items have been permanently removed and we are working with the merchants involved, our goal is to not only meet the minimum legal requirements but also exceed them and we will continue to dedicate significant resources to improve consumer protection.

Teu has broken its promise to customers that it would never allow harmful products on its platform and while saying that sellers comply with international trade laws from things we have tested that do not always seem to be true. The laws we have to crack down on the sale of unsafe products were introduced before the advent of online shopping and that means it's not the platform. team with you, but sellers who are breaking the law. I want to try to figure out what needs to be done to better protect consumers. What we want to see is that online marketplaces have exactly the same responsibilities as all other retailers and right now.

That's not the case, so I bought my last T Hall. I have done one last test. It is illegal to sell tools such as blades to consumers under 18 years of age, even foreign companies must make sure to verify the ages of customers they purchase. restricted items no questions asked I managed to get a really sharp s, but I bought these items without being asked to prove my age. Compressed air guns. Both actually seem quite realistic. 6 months ago, the group of consumers who also purchased age-restricted weapons. From Teemu, the company promised to review its processes to prevent similar cases from happening again, which obviously has not happened yet.

If I could buy them without any control. If you can buy this without proving your age. It's a real surprise. You shouldn't be able to do it. to teu said that we have been testing an age verification system in the UK and hope to implement it soon regarding the technology behind the app. He said the gamification elements are inspired by activities at fairs and shopping centers and are designed to be fun and provide value by allowing customers to unlock discounts as newcomers to the UK. We have been adapting our practices to align with relevant regulations. We are committed to working with stakeholders to address and improve aspects of our application in reference to its 50th promotion.

He said that he respects user privacy. and used only chosen names and profile images to identify senders and recipients of gifts and partially reduced information on reward winners. It said it has never provided user data to the Chinese government nor would it if asked regarding the visibility of its privacy policy. He said he had discovered there was a bug affecting a small number of users, this has now been fixed. You take the security of products sold by third-party merchants very seriously. We have a comprehensive monitoring and compliance process to ensure that products comply with platform rules and regulatory requirements, we immediately removed any product listing in question pending a review in the case of carabiners, while the seller had provided the uiaa certificate, the seller did not clearly mark the name or trademark of the manufacturer or supplier on the products themselves, we will allow resumption of sales only after this problem is corrected, we do not allow fairs and will take action against sellers involved if such cases are discovered, the medical products have been removed and we are conducting a thorough review of other products that claim to be approved by the FDA to ensure that they do not describe their registration status as approval or certification, there is nothing wrong with cheap products, but as I discovered, there may be worrying reasons for the low prices and the current laws protecting consumers are not strong enough when it comes to preventing digital sellers from taking shortcuts, so I think The real question is whether It's worth the risk that they are cheap.