a state of disaster has been declared in the australian state of victoria after a spike in coronavirus infections. melbourne has been placed under curfew. residents will not be allowed to travel more than five kilometres from home. more than half a million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in south africa, along with over 8,000 deaths. south africa is the hardest—hit country on the continent and accounts for half of all reported infections in africa. for the fourth day in a row, india has recorded over 50,000 new cases of the coronavirus. 0ne state — andhra pradesh — has had 30,000 cases in 3 days. the government says the death rate remains relatively low. the space x capsule heading home from the international space station has safely entered orbit around the earth. now, as we've been hearing, there have been some renewed

lockdown measures brought in for parts of northern england. in the past hour, the housing secretary robertjenrick has been asked about the government's plans for further lockdowns. first, he responded to concerns about the re—opening of schools next month. we have to get children back to school in september, it is so important for the future of our children and for the whole country that they have face—to—face contact with their teachers in the classroom. we are working very closely with head teachers and the teaching unions to make sure that all the steps necessary to put in place over the summer so that the children can go back in september. it isa children can go back in september. it is a priority for the government. yes, i believe schools are safe, will be safe in september. we published a very detailed guidelines and we are going to keep working with head teachers over the course of august as they finalise their own

plans as to how their schools can operate safely in accordance with the guidelines, but this is a really important issue for the country. everyone who is a parent knows that however much work is being put into remote learning over the course of recent months, it is not a substitute for getting children back into the classroom. there have been taught, the trade—off of closing pubs and restaurants, would you say thatis pubs and restaurants, would you say that is the way we are going forward 7 that is the way we are going forward? there is a lot of speculation about what might happen in the future but what we are concentrating on is a targeted, rather than a blanket, approach, so if the rate of infection rises to a concerning level, we will take decisive action and you can see we have done that in leicester and we are doing it now in the north—west. it is working. the rate of infection, for example, in leicester is starting to stabilise and fall and some places, where we have imposed further restrictions, like

on the outskirts of leicester, are now free for people to go about their daily lives unimpeded. that is their daily lives unimpeded. that is the approach we will be taking rather than returning to a blanket approach in large parts or indeed across the whole of the country. do you expect to see more of these targeted approaches? do you expect to see more places impose further restrictions? we need to take decisive action, that is what the public expects so we will be following the data and if we see the rate of infection rising in further communities, then we will have to step in, as we have today. we are learning from what we have done in places like leicester. we now have oui’ places like leicester. we now have our emerging and increasingly sophisticated track and trace infrastructure which we can deploy and that is the right approach, because it enables the rest of the country to continue to open up, to go about our daily lives in a responsible but free manner whilst

we are imposing restrictions on those places where there is real concern. what happens when you start banning people going into other people's comes across the country? we are taking a localised approach in the places where it is needed. we have seen some evidence in certain parts of the country of increased transmission between households and so transmission between households and so the approach that we are taking in the north west and in west yorkshire is very much about trying to reduce close contact indoors between households and that is one we will see, we will try to replicate elsewhere in the country, if we need to. at the moment we don't see that. housing secretary there. now on bbc news, click. this week: influencers, influencing. but can you tell which one is the real thing?

hey, welcome to click, hope you are doing 0k. this week we have something special for you. you see, every so often we start investigating a subject thinking it will make a nice, interesting five minute film, but then we tug on a particular thread and it turns out there is something way bigger and way weirder going on than we thought. talking of way weirder, here's 0mar mehtab. hey, mate. hey, how's it going. good thanks. so, do you want to start off by telling us what you were originally sent out to look at? we wanted to find out how online influencers, the big personalities you see on social media, have been impacted

during the pandemic. it seemed pretty straightforward. yeah, and then things got really interesting, right. it did — we started doing a little bit of digging and a pattern emerged of influencers abusing the trust of their millions of followers for their own financial gain. 0ur story started here with some of the biggest social media influencers in the world. a group called faze clan, famous for esports and entertainment. put your hands together for faze clan! they have 230 million followers, and were recently valued at $250 million. social media influencing is the new frontier for marketing. influencers like faze clan make deals with brands to promote products to their millions of followers. this is the first ever faze beats pill. i'm a big man city fan.

for some, it's easy to dismiss influencers, but they are trusted by hundreds of millions of people. and brands know that when it comes to marketing their products, trust translates into money. but the pandemic had financially impacted a lot of these companies. and so we wanted to know if that meant that influencers had also been hit. but it turned out that things had actually been going pretty well for faze clan. so just before the pandemic, a new trend was emerging of influencers moving huge houses together, and these guys now live in a... $35 million estate in los angeles. hey everyone, so would you mind giving me a tour of the house? absolutely. it's incredible to think that social media influencers have become so big that these guys are able to live in a mansion in la.

it's meant to help them collaborate and constantly create new content to feed their hungry fans. something which has come in very handy during the pandemic. this is another spot where we come and spend some time... oh my god. so when you said a lake, you meant an actual flipping lake? more people are watching, more people have time to watch more, and they want more even when they are done, because they are still on the phones and looking for content to consume. what happens during the pandemic, where people are home more, we have direct access to our fan base on a seven days a week, 365 days cycle. and then you have traditional production all on hold, both film and television, and here we are in the gaming space that we can still keep the trains running on time. and we had even an added benefit of some of our celebrity

friends and partners, they are all home also, with very little to do, and we could lean on them to help participate in different pieces of content. we closed deals that were in the pipeline we developed new deals during the pandemic. and the truth is it hasn't all been huge deals and the la highlife for most. here is the thing, the majority of influencers don't have hundreds of millions of followers, and a slick ceo. there are millions of influencers who are sole traders, and they are actually able to make a living with only tens of thousands of followers. the people who are famous to you on instagram may not be the same people who are famous to me on instagram. because there are millions of them who have varying levels of followers and influence. over time, once people got followings that reached a certain level people realised that they were basically owners of mini media empires.

and once the money became clear in that relationship, people started to seek out more followers, more engagement, more brand deals, and build businesses themselves. but those millions of many influencers depend on smaller brands, smaller deals, and a lot less of them. and we found out that many of them have struggled during the pandemic. zara mcdermott is one influencer who sits in the middle ground. she has gotjust under 1.5 million followers and she works with a lot of mid—level brands. i have seen influencers taking on jobs that i wouldn't necessarily see them taking on before the pandemic. just because i think there is a little bit of an air of like, let's take as manyjobs as we possibly can. but this was the moment it became so much more. right at the end of the interview, zara said something that took our investigation in an unexpected new direction.

so since the pandemic began we found we have received a really large quantity of e—mails from brands selling what i think is counterfeit goods, and basically trying to get influencers to market these on their channels, and ijust believe that a lot of these brands are trying to exploit influencers during this time, by offering them excessive amounts of money for very small deliverables. and not all of these influencers had turned these offers down. as you can see i have my new wireless earphones in. i literally use my airpods every single day... the sound quality is banging. really good, and they connect to any bluetooth device. off—camera at zara's interview, her manager charli paton told us that her e—mail inbox was flooded by companies offering

thousands to get them to advertise knockoff products. so we went to find out more. some of the slightly more suspicious brands that reach out to us are often willing to pay, and i know they do actually pay a lot more money than the going rate in the industry, sometimes even up to three times the price that we would usually charge for certain promotions. i think that they prey on the fact that influencers and management companies don't always do this due diligence, they will get through to work with an influencer and potentially be able to scam that influencer‘s followers. so charli was fed up with getting all these scam e—mails asking them to promote knockoff products and put their business at risk. so she wanted to find out — who was behind it all? and there was just one product that kept on coming up again and again and again.

knockoff apple airpods. so the first thing seemed very obvious. we would go straight to the influencers to ask them why they were doing this. we found one influencer called metisha who was getting a lot of flak for promoting a fake airpods brand whose products did not make it to their customers. but to be fair to her, she did reimburse every follower who got scammed. there are a lot of scammy companies. like, honestly i haven't experienced anything like this until the pandemic. this didn't happen to me before the pandemic, and i was quite comfortable, because my girlfriend was like, oh, i saw this, that a lot of uk influencers already do this. i thought, oh, it must be legit. it was my responsibility to make sure this company is legit. i did not do that. so, in order to fix it, i have to stand by my mistake.

and because it is a scam — it's notjust the money. they get angry, you know, why people like us or people who are in public actually do this type of promotion without looking into this. and they are totally right. like, i can't say anything but to apologise. and i think if someone like kyliejenner do this, they need to get it right. and they have the money. they should reimburse every single person, i think. if i can do it, they can do it. and then we found out that even the biggest influencers in the world were being paid to promote these knockoff airpods. each airpod comes with a charging case and a charging cable. swipe up to check them out right now. their whole site is 70% off, and use the code kylie for free shipping. kylie and kendalljenner have a combined following a 337 million followers on instagram,

and there they were promoting a company whose earbuds seem to be an exact copy of apple's airpods. so we e—mailed thejenners, and after speaking to their representatives multiple times, in the end they declined to comment. how is it going? not bad, we uncovered a lot of videos of influencers promoting knockoff apple products on their instagram. this is what happens when people become traders and they don't have the training or they are not aware of the laws, they are just flogging any old stuff. i am actually about to order a couple of pairs for ourselves now, to have a look. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that google announced plans for a new transatlantic undersea network cable to connect the uk, us and spain. universal and movie theatre chain amc to make new films available for streaming online faster, from up to three months to just 17 days. and we heard that ces, one of the world's largest tech events,

with thousands of people meeting in las vegas, will next year be an all—digital online event. it was the week that the heads of apple, amazon, facebook and google appeared before congress. tim cook, jasper goss, mark zuckerberg and sundar pichai defended their company and said they had spurred innovation. computers at the vatican were reportedly breached by a group of state—backed hackers from china. a us cyber security firm made the claim ahead of a sensitive meeting between the vatican and china. an israeli ultrafast battery company demonstrated a five—minute charge of a commercial drone, which they said would normally take 60—90 minutes. the company says it will allow a continuous mission using charging stations. and finally, spot, boston dynamics' robot dog, is back with a newjob and a new name. ford have renamed spot fluffy,

and have unleashed a pair. equipped with five cameras, they will help create 360—degree scans of their factory floor. so we've uncovered lots of videos of influencers promoting knockoff airpods. the next step was to order some for ourselves. i heard something weighty go through my front door letterbox. it is here, all right! it has taken about a week or so. hey! all right? how's it going. a bit of a surprise. 0k. the hinge is similar. all of it is the same. oh, my god! look! i have a pair of airpods here. hold on, i will mix them up in my hand.

which one is the real one? the one on the left. these are fake. they must be breaching apple's design work. who do you actually show these to to get these... we will go to trading standards. so we went to see trading standards, and they were well aware of influencers promoting knockoff goods, and we wanted to know if they could ever combat this. even though it's not necessarily bearing the apple trademark, the overall impression of the packaging, the design of the case, the design of the earbuds inside, is designed to give that impression that this is an apple product, and that is clearly an issue. i think the important thing when we're talking about influencers in particular is that anybody would look at taking a stepped approach in terms of any formal action against influencers. in the first instance, we would probably look at providing some advice to influencers.

having had those conversations around advice about consumer law, influencers then continued to exhibit breaches, at that point is the time when trading standards could consider more formal action against influencers. and, because of the way these transactions are happening, it makes it harder for regulators to track the knockoffs. it does make it easier for products to enter the uk supply chain that perhaps otherwise would have been more readily detected if they were coming in perhaps in large quantities. ok, so, another company that charlie had forwarded to us was one called soundplay who were also selling these earphones. and i ordered them about a month ago. here they are! they're obviously copying apple's images. it keeps stopping and starting, these aren't even functioning properly. yeah, these are really bad.

i'm going to charge them up because this one works and this one doesn't. so i charged them and unbelievably, this one earphone still didn't work. so i e—mailed soundplay about them selling knockoff airpods and mine not even working, but they didn't reply. so talk to me about apple, have you found out whether apple are doing anything about this problem? well, apple did tell us they're taking action against companies selling knockoff goods. there is one company we've been looking at, however, nova play. kyliejenner made a video advertising them back in november and made one as recently as may as well, and since then they've been operating this whole time. so for a company that's being advertised by a massive influencer, you'd think they would pick up on that. apple's not shy about protecting its replication, let's be honest, although, i suppose kyliejenner is also a massive personality so maybe this is a case of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. i tell you, it's really interesting,

stay in touch, let me know how you get on. apple did provide a statement for us and said that last year alone, they sought the removal of close to a million listings for counterfeit and knockoff products from online marketplaces. it was about this time that we started talking to some e—commerce experts to find out who was behind this wave of knockoff product and influencer promotions. and there was one word that kept coming up. drop shipping. drop shipping has become this highly accessible business for a lot of people. all you need is an internet connection and a laptop and you're ready to go. the issue of drop shipping is a relatively new phenomenon. it's a very, very fast—moving business model that's constantly changing, we're constantly seeing new entrants into the market, new platforms that provide the service, so as regulators and enforcers, to a certain extent, we're always trying play catch up.

we started searching and we found hundreds of people saying they were making a fortune drop shipping. but what is it? here's a little rundown. the drop shipper goes to an online chinese marketplace, often ali express. they find a low—priced product, set up a website and add a huge markup. influencers are paid to promote the product and send you straight to the website. when you buy the product, it ships directly to you from china. the seller could be on a different continent and never even see the product. drop shippers don't hold any inventory so there's no financial risk. and it's important to be really clear. drop shipping isn't illegal. for example, here's kevin david who just moved into his pretty sweet new apartment in miami. and he gave us a very honest insight about the insane amount

of money that drop shippers are actually making. you can have a massive business without ever going to china. right? i've personally sent millions of dollars to china, i've gotten millions and millions of dollars worth of products, i've never been to china. those airpods, i've actually seen, some of my friends have stores doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month selling those, right? someone will spend hundreds of millions, however much money it costs to create it and then china will essentially reverse engineer it. some sharp drop shippers take advantage of that and they create massive, massive incomes by leveraging those trends and being able to offer those really exclusive high end products for much cheaper. it's very easy to take the moral high road but i think if a lot of people had the skill set and caught a trend at a certain time and were making $1000 profit a day or $10,000 profit a day, i think they would probably think slightly differently about that circumstance. so we contacted loads of drop

shippers and even chatted to quite a few of them and there was one thing that really stood out amongst them all, they're just like you and me. some of them even work out of their bedroom. but the difference is, they're making huge sums of money. i couldn't even afford the rent so i blew it up, i blew my credit up. so fast forward, i grabbed one of the products that took me to, it was a super bowl ring, i made $55,000 in that month, quit myjob, and then fast forward, i made over $20 million in the last five years. drop shipping dramatically changed my life. all we needed to do was look on youtube at these guys bragging about how much money they're making and sharing tips on how to get in on it. and when we were going through all these videos, we found something incredible. one guy was even showing other drop shippers a template letter to copy and send influencers.

it was that easy. and the template that i give my students that you can just copy and paste and use for yourself. it's right here. instagram influencer reach out script. and i'm going to say "hey", and the name of that person "my name is", and you're going to put your name. that youtube explainer was stunning and revealed so much. the professional looking e—mails charlie showed us, sent from the mysterious companies, were actually just from bedrooms around the world. and the shadowy drop shippers were just entrepreneurs trying their luck. like many things, you've got your good guys and you've got your bad guys, but the problem is, it's really easy to be a bad guy when you're an anonymous person sitting behind a laptop. and gabrielle told us how some drop shippers can easily scam people. i see stores that come and go that, they literally steal money from people. one of the stores were selling ironman hat which was like a real hat that goes up and down

and they were selling it for $29. when you go to ali baba and aliexpress, the selling price is what is real, and those stores make millions of dollars within a month and they theyjust wipe the entire store and they collect the money, they disappear and they don't ship any products. and those stores are literally, like, everywhere. anybody, literally, can identify and source products online, can set up a means to have those products shipped, can do so, to a large extent, with a good degree of anonymity, quickly sell a whole bunch of dangerous or counterfeit products and then exit the system before regulators have had a chance to even catch up, is obviously a significant concern for us. so we went to the source of all of this — instagram, and they replied, telling us that "there's no place forfraudulent or inauthentic behaviour on instagram and we removed the accounts brought to their attention." they didn't answer the question about taking any action against influencers themselves,

however, they did tell us they must follow local laws and vet brands before agreeing to any paid partnership. so, from zara telling us about the suspicious e—mails she'd been receiving, we delved into a world made possible only by the modern internet. now, a teenager in kansas can persuade an influencer in london to promote a product. then that leads to someone in stockholm buying something from a factory in china which copies the design of a company in california. it's a truly global story. what are your final thoughts on this subject? well, with everyone that we've spoken to, there seems to be a consensus that influencers should be held to the same standard as other traders. and i guess if influencers continue to promote these imitations goods,

their trust will be eroded, too. so what can people do to protect themselves? take your time. don'tjust have that knee—jerk reaction and buy something that you see come up on your feed. check social media, check review websites. if there are complaints against the company or what people are saying about the product. and, if it's too good to be true... then it probably is. 0mar, thanks so much. that's it from us. you'd be interested to know, i'm sure, that 0mar also investigated a couple of other companies that are using and possibly abusing social media influencers, and you can hear that part of his investigation on the trending podcast which is on bbc sounds. you can find us on social media and last time i checked, you can trust us. we are on facebook, youtube, instagram and twitter, at bbc click. thanks for watching and we'll see you soon. theme music plays.

good afternoon. the government has insisted that further coronavirus restrictions will be targeted at local levels, with no plans for a national blanket approach. it comes after reports that new measures are being considered to avoid a nationwide lockdown. the housing secretary, robertjenrick, also said that ministers will press ahead with plans to reopen schools in england to all pupils in september, despite concern that it would drive up cases of coronavirus. jenny kumah reports.