Amazon and UL, a company that tests and certifies that products meet safety standards, settled a lawsuit in July with several Chinese companies that manufacture ebikes under the Aipas brand name.
The US companies accused the Chinese firms in January of claiming in Amazon listings and on Aipas’ website that the ebikes had been certified by UL, giving recognizable, brand-name assurance to online shoppers worried about risks like ebike lithium-ion battery fires. But that wasn’t true. On July 15, a federal judge signed off on a permanent injunction in which the companies agreed that they would no longer use the UL mark. It also bars them from “assisting, aiding, or abetting any other person or business” in doing the same.
The filing notes that the Chinese companies didn’t admit liability or wrongdoing tied to Amazon’s and UL’s accusations of knowingly using fraudulent safety-certification marks. (The enterprises involved are Jiangmen Meijiasheng Bicycle, Hong Kong Manchester International Trading, Shenzhen Aibosi Sport Technology, Guangzhou Aierfeile Sport Technology, and the individual Tang Shuhui, who the lawsuit alleges was involved in an Amazon selling account.)
But WIRED has found a Facebook account associated with Aipas Ebike still running ads that include UL’s bright red logo. A WIRED reporter was served one of the ads in mid-July, even after the companies had agreed to a permanent injunction. At least one other ad using the UL mark has been actively running on Facebook since April, months after the lawsuit was filed, according to Meta’s Ad Library. Another active ad including the UL mark and first posted in May appeared to disappear from the Ad Library after WIRED contacted both Aipas and UL for comment.
WIRED also found that while some Aipas ebikes and their batteries did eventually receive safety certifications from a nationally recognized organization, seemingly months after the company began advertising its UL safety marks, some of those certificates are now inactive.
A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit. Bradley Carlson, a spokesperson for UL, also declined to comment on the lawsuit but said the UL team is “aware and working to resolve” the issues related to the Facebook ads. Neither Aipas Ebike nor the lawyer representing the Chinese businesses in court responded to multiple requests for comment.
While fights over fraudulent product safety certifications don’t always break out into public view, “this is a common problem and has been a common problem for quite some time,” says Donald Mays, a longtime product safety expert who now runs his own consulting firm.
The trend has troubling implications, especially for electric mobility devices like ebikes. A report published by the US government in April found that 45 fatalities between 2017 and 2024 were associated with fires related to lithium-ion batteries in mobility devices, 19 of them related to ebikes alone. The New York City Fire Department, which tracks lithium-ion battery fires, logged 277 fires tied to the tech in 2024, compared with 268 in 2023, and linked them to ebikes.
Many of the country’s ebike fires were associated with replacement battery packs, as noted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an independent federal agency. The agency has urged consumers to use only micromobility devices “designed, manufactured, and certified for compliance by an accredited laboratory with the applicable consensus safety standards,” according to its website.
The false certification is more prevalent on online marketplaces like Amazon, says Gabe Knight, a senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports. “Just as consumers are more at risk to buy a counterfeit product, period, from third-party sellers, they are more at risk to buy a product with a fabricated certification mark,” she says. In general, retailers who sell products to consumers directly, rather than simply hosting sales, do a better job of guaranteeing their merchandise’s safety claims, she says; these retailers usually have internal compliance programs to verify manufacturers’ basic safety claims.
Read the full article here