Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) - In a warehouse on the outskirts of Bangkok, garbage bags appear full of used medical gloves, some of which are clearly dirty, and some are stained with blood, scattered on the floor.
In the neighborhood, a plastic bowl full of blue dye appears next to a few gloves.
Thai officials say migrant workers were trying to make gloves look new again, when the Thai health authorities raided the facility last December.
There are many warehouses that are still open today in Thailand, which are trying to take advantage of the demand for medical nitrin gloves, which increased with the outbreak of the Corona virus.
These warehouses make millions of these -level gloves to export them to the United States and countries around the world, amid a global deficiency.
In a period of months, a CNN investigation has found that tens of millions of imitator and used neutral gloves have arrived in the United States, according to import records and distributors who bought the gloves.
The authorities are conducting criminal investigations in the United States and Thailand.
Experts describe makers full of fraud, as one of them - Douglas Stein - told CNN that nitrin gloves are "the most dangerous commodity on earth at the present time."
"There is a huge amount of upcoming bad products, an endless torrent of dirty gloves used and below the level that comes to the United States, and it appears that federal authorities now began only to understand the huge size."
However, despite the potential risks of health care workers and patients on the front lines, the American authorities have struggled to deal with illegal trade, in part due to the suspension of the import regulations for the import of preventive medical equipment temporarily at the height of the pandemic, and are still pending today.
During February and March of this year, one of the American companies and two federals, the Customs Authority, the United States and the US Food and Drug Administration, warned that it had received shipments full of dirty gloves below the required level from one of the manufacturers in Thailand.
However, this Thai company managed to ship tens of millions of gloves in the following months, some of which recently arrived in July.
The US Food and Drug Administration told CNN that she could not comment on individual cases, but confirmed that she had taken "a number of steps to find those who sell uncomfortable products and stop them by taking advantage of our experience in the investigation, examining and reviewing medical products, whether on the borders or within the tradeLocal.
A boom in the request
In early 2020, the demand for PIPIs increasingly spread amid the spread of the Corona virus epidemic around the world.
The prices of nitilizer gloves remained high.
Medical nitrin gloves are used by doctors and healthcare professionals during patient exams.
The US Food and Drug Administration prohibits the use of LAMAD powder in health care, while low -quality vinyl gloves are more common in industrial environments and food handling.
Gloves, which are almost fully produced in southern and eastern Asia, depend on limited supplies of natural rubber, highly specialized factories, and specialized manufacturing experience.Production intensification cannot occur quickly, and production has been talked by reliable and established brands for years.
Governments and hospital systems were quick to secure their needs, and dozens of suspicious companies looking forward to reaping quick profits are the opportunity to do so.
Late last year, Tariq Kirchhen, a Miami businessman, asked for two million dollars from a company based in Thailand called "Paddy The Room", which he then sold to an American distributor.
He recalls, "We started receiving phone calls from completely upset clients, and they screaming with the phrase: We have cheated on us."
Kirchn got the product himself when a second shipment reached Miami, and told CNN: "These gloves were reused, washed and recycled."
"Some of them were dirty, others had blood spots, while some had signs indicating dates of two years," Kirch.
Kirchhen says that he returned the money to his customers, threw gloves in the landfill, then informed the US Food and Drug Administration last February, stressing that none of the gloves he requested in the medical circles were used, but the CNN analysis of import records showed that other American distributorsThey got about 200 million "Paddy The Room" gloves during the pandemic.
It is not clear what happened to these gloves after entering the country.
For its part, CNN tried to reach all importers, and the vast majority did not respond, but two companies said that the charges are below the required level and gloves were not of the type of nitrin.
A company "Uweport" told CNN that she had not been able to resell it to medical companies, as planned, and instead, it was sold at a lower price for distributors who provide food processing factories, hotels and American restaurants.
The other company, "US Liberty LLC", explained that it had faced a very similar fraud experience, and the company's president, Firas Jarrar, told CNN that a different Vietnamese company sent them "gloves with holes, spots, and torn."
Stein, who has been buying personal protection equipment from Asia for decades, has been tracing and countless fraud and fraud throughout Southeast Asia since the start of the pandemic.
He told CNN: "It is a brilliant matter that is ridiculous," he told CNN.
Stein often finds himself advice to people who have lost millions of dollars due to nitilized staples, and tries to persuade others to abandon the signing of deals that are so good to be so good to believe.
Stein explains that the discounts offered are often impossible.
Luis Zeskin is among the American entrepreneurs who have been deceived by purchasing.
His company, "Airqueen" signed a $ 2.7 million request from "Paddy The Room", on a third -party also based in Asia.The payment was in advance.
And Zeskin is a former sentence that spent more than a decade behind bars, after he was arrested while smuggling drugs to the United States in 2000.
But in the past decade, a successful technological entrepreneur has become a successful technology, but he then entered a dark world for selling nitrin gloves.
A separate examination conducted in the Los Angeles warehouse and CNN was achieved that the majority of the gloves he bought were not of the type of nitrin, but of the type of latex or low -level vinyl, and it was very clear that many of them were dirty and used.
Zeskin says there was no way to transfer these gloves to hospitals with a live conscience.
He added to CNN: "This is a completely related to safety," noting that it is shocking that these companies were not included in the blacklist.
It may be because it is a complex fraud.
The company "Paddy The Room" sent pure independent inspection reports to Zeskin claiming that the gloves in the shipment were high quality.But the documents were forged.
The inspection company, whose report was formed to CNN, confirmed that the reports are forged.
Like Kirschin, Zeskin sounded the alarm by notifying the American authorities shortly after receiving a shipment of bad gloves early this year, and communicated with both the US Food and Drug Administration, the Customs Authority and the United States to protect the United States.
However, import records showed that the warnings did not seem to have a difference.
Since Zeskin's written warning to the Customs and Border Protection Authority last February, 28 charges have entered more than 80 million gloves by "Paddy The Room" to the United States.
The flow of gloves below the level to the United States has also been facilitated by the temporary suspension of the US Food and Drug Administration for Import.
Stein explained: "There was no other solution, there was no way to meet the demand, but that opened the door wide open to all the impressive behavior."
In a statement, the CNN Food and Drug Administration told CNN that companies were allowed to import only according to the mitigating rules, explaining that "as long as gloves correspond to the criteria of consensus and name mentioned in the instructions and where the gloves do not pose an unnecessary danger."
Nevertheless, a few tests are performed on gloves or any other elements that reach American ports, and no false or even contaminated medical gloves are likely to be discovered.
Last August, the US Food and Drug Administration recently sent an alert to all port employees that shipments from the company "Paddy The Room" must be held to detention without examination.
This was five months after Kirchin and Zeskin launched the alarm.
The US Food and Drug Administration did not comment on its investigation at the company "Paddy The Room", but officials of the Ministry of Internal Security confirmed that there is a criminal investigation underway in the company.
The Customs and Border Protection Authority confirmed to CNN that it had confiscated about 40 million fake muzzles and hundreds of thousands of other personal protection equipment.
She indicated that she had seized some gloves shipments, but did not track the size of the seizures.
CNN asked a question to the Ministry of National Security whether the regime had failed, given the number of used gloves that entered the American supply chain.
"I do not know whether this is the correct way to formulate the question," said Mike Rose, the prosecutor for the investigations of the Ministry of Internal Security.We are working for that. "
During the last spring, at the beginning of the pandemic, the Ministry of National Security launched what it called "Opection Stallen Promise" (the process of stolen promise) to suppress counterfeit personal protection equipment specifically, which Rose indicates that it has revealed more than 2,000 of related treatments.Kovid-19 "and personal protection equipment.
"I think the Ministry of Internal Security is a role model all over the world in the best ways to coordinate efforts between the various agencies to stop importing, transactions and all other criminal activities surrounding Kofid-19," Rose said.