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.

“It’s really polluting the marketplace when consumers can’t trust the information they see online,” Knight says.

The US government seems to be interested in cracking down on fake safety certifications. In May, the Consumer Product Safety Commission posted that it is “aware of instances in which the misuse of certification marks appears to be part of broader efforts to evade US safety requirements.” It asked for public input to better understand the prevalence of counterfeit marks.

Separately, in June, the CPSC proposed a rule to establish federal mandatory safety standards for the lithium-ion batteries used in micromobility products, including ebikes. (Some but not all states and local governments require lithium-ion batteries sold in their localities to meet mandatory safety standards, though there are federal standards for shipping batteries.) The agency will accept public comments through August. Spokespeople for the CPSC did not respond to WIRED’s questions.

Scott Hardesty, a YouTube ebike reviewer who posted videos critical of Aipas last fall, says his interactions with the company pushed him to create a new reviewing procedure. “After dealing with them, I started making companies send me their UL certificates,” he tells WIRED. “I need them to send them to me in an email.” (Hardesty says he receives commissions from companies for ebike sales made through his YouTube channel.)

In the Aipas lawsuit, lawyers for UL and Amazon said the companies were cracking down on counterfeits and fraudulent claims. They pointed to seven other recent legal actions against companies using fraudulent safety certification marks, including one 2023 case in which both Amazon and UL sued several Chinese companies for illegally using UL marks on smoke detectors without obtaining the required safety testing.

Last year, New York City nixed a plan to use Fly ebikes in a new delivery-worker bike-swap program after the company and UL agreed to a $1 million settlement in which Fly stipulated that it had used counterfeit UL marks. Streetsblog reported on eight lawsuits claiming the company was associated with fire-related injuries and deaths.

The Aipas lawsuit says that Amazon invested more than a billion dollars and employed thousands of people in 2024 to protect customers and brands from counterfeit and fraudulent goods. It says its system “automatically and continuously scans thousands of data points to prevent, detect, and remove counterfeits from its stores and to terminate the selling accounts of bad actors before they can offer counterfeit products.”

High Standards

Safety standards and the workings of the bodies that certify products can be confusing and difficult to understand. UL is one of the most reputable standards-writing organizations in the world, though others, including CSA Group and IEC, also write standards. But, for a fee, UL also tests products to guarantee they meet its standards; only companies that test their products through UL are permitted to use UL’s logos in advertising.

Other organizations, called Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories, have been authorized by the US government to test products to UL’s and other safety standards. Companies choose one lab over another mostly because of price, Mays says.

Documents posted on Aipas’ website suggest that some of its ebikes and batteries did receive safety certifications eventually from one of these authorized companies, in this case, SGS. But a closer look at the documents reveals irregularities.

The Amazon and UL lawsuit alleges that Aipas marketed its ebikes with the UL marks “at various times” from 2024 through 2025. In September 2025, according to an SGS certificate, an SGS employee certified that the lithium-ion batteries used in Aipas ebikes met a UL safety standard. At the end of that month, according to another SGS certificate, an SGS employee certified ebikes in the “M” Aipas line to the same standard. At the end of November, ebikes in the “A” and “F’ Aipas lines were also certified.

But while the company’s battery certificate is still active, the three certificates for the ebikes as a whole are not. In an email, a representative for SGS wrote that “as a third party, we are not at liberty to discuss the status of a certification.”

As of July, Aipas’ website accurately describes its lithium-ion batteries as “SGS Certified” to a UL safety standard. But it also continues to link to the inactive SGS ebike safety certificates, which buyers might discover only by following the QR code at the bottom of the certificate, or by looking up an individual product in SGS’ online directory.

An inactive safety certificate isn’t necessarily a sign that a product that was once certified is now unsafe, Mays says. Certificates can expire if a company changes a design or component on its product and doesn’t pay a certification body to recertify it. A product might also lose its certification if the company doesn’t submit its product to several inspections a year.

Still, when Mays bought his own ebikes, he made sure that they met the two related UL safety certifications and that their certificates were valid.

For people who aren’t product safety experts, that kind of document-forward legwork might be beyond reach. “The average consumer is not going to be able to figure this out,” Hardesty says.