Counterfeit cords blamed for fires; sold in Valley

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All extension cords are the same right? Hardly.

Some cords look like all the rest, but inside they have little copper or insulation.

And Brett Brenner with the Electrical Safety Foundation International says they can cause a lot of damage.

"These products can hurt you, burn down your house or even kill you," Brenner says.

Government statistics show 3,300 residential fires, 50 deaths, 270 injuries in United States are blamed on faulty cords.

One reason is a rise in cheap counterfeit cords imported from China or Hong Kong.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled hundreds of thousands of them.

But could we still find them in the Valley? We bought extension cords at 4 Phoenix stores where you may buy them cheap.

We then took them to Scottsdale Deputy Fire Marshall Mike MacCrone and asked him to cut them open.

He says it's obvious there is a different between the older more expensive cord we brought him, and the new cheaper cord we just bought.

"You can feel how brittle it is," MacCrone says referring to the new cord.

On the outside they look a like, but the more expensive cord had much more material to handle electric loads.

MacCrone thought the copper was double the diameter of the cheaper version.

And one of the cheap cords we bought came with another surprise. It had UL label on it.

That would mean it was safety tested by Underwriters Laboratories.

But the Underwriters Laboratories website showed it's a fake and the cord manufacturer was using the UL label fraudulently.

We went back to the 99 cent store on McDowell Road in Phoenix.

The clerk said he did not know there was an issue and said he would pull the cords from his shelves.

We could not contact the manufacturer because there was no name on the packaging.

It is one warning sign that the cord is counterfeit. Other warnings include misspellings on the packaging.

UL says they have a new label that must be on all of their tested products by July 1st and they share other ways of finding counterfeit UL labels.