Episode 1 Doorstep Crime 999

There's one issue you've told us really makes you tear your hair out.

People like that absolutely astound me.

It's a crime which is on the rise, and it's getting worse.

Traders will target people they think they can get away with this kind of thing with.

Too often, it's the most vulnerable people who are targeted.

You don't let people get ripped off, not when they're friends. It's not right.

We're talking about crime that can take place on our own doorsteps,

anything from cold-calling conmen to rip-off rogue traders,

and we're united against them.

I think we're too easy on them.

it does leave people feeling incredibly violated and vulnerable

because it happens in their home, where they're supposed to feel safe.

It needs to be stopped abruptly, here and now.

We're here with one aim - to stop these rogues in their tracks.

Our cameras have been out with award-winning

police and Trading Standards teams all over the country

and, with your help, we're campaigning

to show doorstep con artists the door.

Today, the successful convictions for an outrageous con.

This is the most staggering footage you'll ever see

of doorstep crime in full flow.

It's a joke to them, which really does demonstrate

the actual nastiness of these as individuals.

Plus, the mobility company that gets its just desserts after ripping

people off with a sales bible that has to be seen to be believed.

It starts with, "Remember, you're not a salesperson but an adviser,

"paid to do an assessment."

Well, it starts to be a fraud there, because they are salesmen.

And a pair of fraudsters go down for the most shocking con of all.

This man lost his house, all from a doorstep rip-off.

I feel very angry about it, even to myself,

about why it happened to me.

Hello, your e-mails and letters about cold callers

keep us very, very busy.

There's nothing worse than opening your front door

and finding a stranger on the doorstep,

and from what I've been reading viewers like Adrian Vodden

and Brian Hauxwell completely agree

and want to stop the cons dead in their tracks.

But what do we mean by doorstep crime?

Well, prepare to be shocked

This is the most extraordinary footage of a doorstep crime

we may ever see.

This gang of crooks are actually filming themselves

while pretending the bottle of milk is an expensive driveway sealant

and they're charging an astronomical amount for this unbelievable con.

The footage was discovered by Lancashire Police

when they were investigating cases of stolen cars

and money laundering linked to a family called Tomney.

It shocked officers across the northwest

and makes for astounding viewing.

'It's an absolute rip-off, the video demonstrates that'

they have no remorse that this an elderly chap.

The victim of this shocking scandal is 79-year-old Brian Smith.

They did a small job across the road from where I live

and they came over and said my path

wasn't in very good condition, did I want anything doing with it?

They offered to re-point the paving and part of the wall for £550

which Brian thought sounded reasonable, so he agreed.

Cold calling like this gives them a way in and will allow them

to charge much more later on.

A classic tactic the rogue traders use is cold call on addresses

that look to be occupied by elderly people.

They secure work and then go on to find additional work that needs to be done.

They then bump up the cost of the work, and demand that

from the generally elderly victims.

Lancashire Police is the headquarters for this investigation

What you see here, the guy in the orange luminous jacket

is a lad by the name of Frank Tomney.

He's 19 years of age, and basically they're in a street in Stockport.

They've cold called on Mr Smith who lives here, a vulnerable man.

What you can see from the video is that the work is extremely poor.

There's absolutely no expertise, and none of these individuals

held any building or similar qualifications.

Having completed their first rip-off - this shoddy cement work,

for which they're charging £550 - their next doorstep crime

is to convince Brian that he needs a special sealant

to stop weeds growing through.

For this they're asking for an extra £250

and not only that, they want the lot in cash.

Brian was made to feel like a prisoner in his own home.

They were two big chaps.

You can see I'm only small man myself so I was feeling a bit apprehensive.

Without this footage shot by the gang, Brian and the police

would never have known the extent of the rip-off being carried out.

So, inside of Frank Tomney's jacket you'll see that

there's a one litre carton of milk,

and this is what they're passing off as the sealant.

The Tomneys are obviously revelling in this cold calling con.

It's a joke to them, they're joking throughout the video,

and to my mind they were going to share this with other criminals

and friends and laugh and joke at the expense of this old chap,

which really does demonstrate the nastiness of these individuals.

They dilute the milk with water into a huge drum.

It's that solution, the mixture of milk and water,

that they spray using a watering can across the driveway

and the other paved areas on the property.

They have suggested to Mr Smith that this is a sealant

that will protect the driveway and paving,

which of course it isn't.

Classic rogue trader type of tactic.

So that's £250 for the bottle of milk, and £550 for the pointing,

bringing the total that Brian paid to a staggering £800.

This is just unbelievable.

Well, we'll be checking up on that shocking investigation

and showing you how justice was done a little later in the programme.

Here's another example of doorstep crime.

Hi, Gloria, I'm Helen, and I'm from Derbyshire.

My mum was subjected to some horrible hard-sell techniques.

I'd like to help put a stop to it and think your viewers

would be fascinated to find out just how these people operate,

and hopefully it will warn them

not to fall for these tactics in the future.

We'll be finding out about the devious hard-selling tricks Helen's referring to later on.

But first, here is an extraordinary story,

this time from south east London.

I've been to meet a man who found out just how great

the cost of doorstep crime can be.

John Hobbs used to live in a beautiful five bedroom house in South East London.

Thanks to a door-stepping scoundrel by the name of Moses Mead,

he lost the house, and so much more.

I want to find out just how one rogue builder could have had

such a disastrous effect on John's life.

John, take me back to that fateful day when you met Moses Mead.

Well, I was out doing some gardening.

He was driving round in a white van with a couple of other people.

Came up and talked to me in the front garden, and he said,

"I'll give you a special deal and I will clean the driveway for you."

Mead's offer to spray clean John's driveway was only the start,

because he then claimed it needed resurfacing,

which he would do, by the way, for a bargain price.

It all seemed very plausible.

But this guy had form -

this CCTV picture still shows him in the midst of committing

a previous fraud for which he had already served a prison sentence.

DC Paul Walker of Kent Police

was only too familiar with Mead's methods.

He certainly had the gift of the gab.

He would engage his victims in conversation about work that

was required at the house, and in many cases work was carried out.

The ability to gain someone's trust is essential for any trickster,

and Mead had found a particularly vulnerable victim,

as John was still grieving the death of his beloved mother from cancer.

Because of your guard being so low,

you're vulnerable to suggestion, shall we say.

I know, and you're feeling the loss of your mum and very low,

and I suppose a bit confused by everything going on around you.

Once you start, you're in a circle which you cannot get out of.

Somehow, Moses Mead managed to convince John that the house

not only required treatment for damp,

it was also subsiding and needed urgent structural work

to stop it from collapsing.

In fact, this greedy, door-stepping conman

was charging John thousands of pounds unnecessarily.

And there seemed to be little evidence of any actual works taking place.

Every time I challenged him, he said, "It's all done and we put everything back."

-So, "We're tidy."

-We're tidy workers.

Mead then devised a way to fleece even more money

from his vulnerable victim.

One of the tricks he used was that he needed

to get special equipment and machinery from Germany,

which John Hobbs had to pay up front for.

The machinery never arrived and he needed more money,

then it was the wrong machinery and had to be sent back -

that was just one of the methods that he used.

So, how much money were you paying out for these various jobs -

the driveway, the damp, all of that - what sort of amounts?

-100,000, if not more.

-100,000?

Surely that made you very suspicious?

I know it should have done, but it just didn't.

I just...I was just out of it.

But, in typical conman style,

Even paying Moses Mead wasn't straightforward.

John was instructed to pay the foreman.

He would go to his bank, withdraw these vast sums of money,

place them in a carrier bag and then hand it over to a man.

We know that man now as Christopher Latty.

To all of us, that's extraordinary.

Although described by Mead as his foreman, Christopher Latty

was in fact a fellow doorstep conman with a long criminal record.

It was Latty who acted as the courier,

regularly collecting bundles of cash from John over many months.

Were they harassing you every day for the money, on the phone all the time?

One day the phone started about 8 o'clock

and it never stopped ringing until the evening.

I just didn't bother to answer it.

In one year alone he'd received over 500 phone calls from Moses Mead.

So, not happy with emptying every penny from John's bank account,

this callous conman hatched an outrageous plan

to extort even more cash.

He said, "Why don't you sell your property?"

He said, "It's such a big place,

"the money you'd get back would be enough to buy a new property."

John was conned into selling his house for £400,000,

and - you guessed it - he handed over the lot to Mead and Latty.

It's shocking to think that there really were no depths

these fraudsters would sink to.

Did you have any money left over from the house sale?

No, nothing out of the house sale,

nothing out of most of the money I had, in the end.

-He had it?

-He had it all, near enough.

Thanks to these heartless doorstep criminals,

John was now penniless and living alone in a rented house.

John had been duped out of thousands and thousands of pounds,

and at this stage he was feeling trapped, pressurised,

alone, extremely vulnerable.

But, thankfully for him, help was around the corner -

the police were on the case.

John Hobbs was one of many victims across the South East of England.

As we began to investigate those crimes,

there was a common thread that went through all the deceptions.

And it was the same mobile phone number was ringing those victims.

It was a pre-paid phone

and, therefore, we needed to find out who was using it.

Police desperately needed to catch

Moses Mead in the act of using the phone.

As luck would have it,

he'd already been caught on CCTV buying a top-up card.

It wasn't long before his greed got the better of him,

and he made one more call to John.

The police were with John Hobbs when he took that phone call.

In fact, it was Moses Meade asking John Hobbs

when the next payment of £47,000 was coming.

And, at that time,

we arrested Moses Mead in possession of the phone ringing John Hobbs.

By the time police thwarted Moses Mead's conniving campaign,

he'd managed to fleece John out of an astonishing £520,000.

The evidence was overwhelming.

Moses Mead had no option

but to plead guilty to 11 counts of fraud by misrepresentation.

And, as such, received four years imprisonment.

The trial took place in July 2010.

His accomplice, Christopher Latty,

was given a three-and-a-half year prison term

for his part in the fraud.

John's hoping to recover at least some of his money

through the Proceeds of Crime Act,

but the very painful memories stay with him.

Do you have a lot of anger? A lot of hatred of the whole thing?

I'll say yes to that. I feel very angry about it.

Even to myself about why it happened to me.

It's ironic think that if he hadn't been outside his house

at the very moment Mead and Latty drove by,

things would be very different for John.

I'm just glad he's trying to stay positive.

At the end of the day,

it's your health what matters, not the money.

The money is just a piece of paper.

So, John, I'm sure people watching this

are as astounded as I have been at the enormity of your scam.

What advice would you give all of us?

If anybody comes to your door

and tries to persuade you to get any kind of work done,

I would say always go and get a second opinion,

to make sure the work has to be done.

But, anyway, we wish you good health in the future, John.

And, as you say, you've learnt a very, very tough lesson.

Still to come, the company directors who received hefty prison sentences.

They used a sales bible

to manipulate and con pensioners out of over £2 million.

It's basically...

a teaching manual of how to bully the most vulnerable

and elderly people in the country.

We absolutely love receiving your letters and e-mails.

I've had an e-mail from Mark Fitzgerald,

a Police Community Support Officer from Manchester

who is very passionate about his local beat.

He holds monthly home-watch meetings, coaching local residents

about the dangers of bogus officials and doorstep conmen.

They obviously appreciate it, because, to help him out,

some of the residents have been staying up at night,

keeping an eye out for burglars.

So, keep up the good work, Mark, and thanks for getting in touch.

Now, it's time to find out how police officers in Lancashire

brought that troublesome Tomney family to justice.

This home video was filmed by

a gang of crooks as they ripped off pensioner Brian Smith.

They had already charged him £550 to shoddily re-point his brickwork.

Then they charged him £250 to seal his driveway

with a special chemical. In actual fact was just a 90p bottle of milk,

diluted and sprayed on with a watering can.

But Brian wasn't the only person to have been ripped off

on his own doorstep by the Tomney Family.

Here's local Trading Standards Officer, Lee Ormandy.

Lancashire Trading Standards received in excess of 40 complaints

from distressed and vulnerable members of the public

who'd been scammed out of thousands of pounds by this particular group.

And the scale of this family's web of deceit

soon became clear to the police.

We established that there were numerous other victims

of the Tomney family and enquiries that took us

as far afield as Hertfordshire.

The Tomneys were arrested

and charged with offences to nine victims,

from whom a staggering amount of £61,704 was extorted.

On top of that, police believe there are more victims

who were taken for almost another £108,000.

But the Tomney family as a whole seem to have pocketed

a phenomenal sum from all their criminal activities.

As a result of enquiries,

the police were able to identify three safety deposit boxes.

And within those, we recovered and seized £480,000

that is all linked to the Tomney family.

I think you'll agree, that's an extraordinary kitty of ill-gotten gains.

The incredible lengths that the Tomney family went to

was exposed in the national press, when, in November 2011,

they were collectively sentenced to 20 years in prison

and ordered to repay £800,000 for their criminal activities.

After the trauma he suffered at the hands of the Tomneys,

brave Brian has a message for others who face similar intimidation.

Now, I mean...

anybody who comes at the door, I just shift them.

I won't entertain anything from the door now.

I think you'll agree, a superb result there

for Lancashire Police and Trading Standards.

Now, remember the video we saw earlier of Helen in Derbyshire?

Well, she has a story to tell which shows how

we can all bring doorstep criminals to justice.

And I can't wait to see how they got their comeuppance.

This is the sales bible for a mobility company

called REO Marketing Ltd.

It looks harmless enough, but listen to this quote:

Grammatically, it's a shocking read.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

One person who wasn't surprised, though, was Derbyshire Trading Standards Officer Paul Niblock

when the document was seized

during a raid on the company's offices.

REO marketing came to our attention in the early part of 2010.

It was a phoenix company

from a previous mobility company called Compass Mobility.

A phoenix company is one which is formed by the directors

of another failed venture.

Neither of these businesses are to be confused

with reputable companies of a similar name,

but when REO Marketing rose from the ashes of Compass Mobility,

the unscrupulous traits of its previous incarnation were still present.

We know they were buying in lists of telephone numbers,

exclusively for people who were over 65.

The call operators knew they were phoning up somebody

who was elderly and the chances are

they would also be infirm or have some sort of disability.

They started by saying, "Hello, I'm Paul. I'm phoning from REO.

"We're doing a survey on arthritis in the Matlock area."

One person who received this cold calling treatment

was an 80-year-old lady who lives alone and wishes to remain private,

so we'll refer to her as Ivy. Her daughter takes up the story.

Mum had a phone call

over doing a survey on mobility aids.

She answered the questions.

From then on, she was bombarded every couple of days

with phone calls, asking her...

if she wanted to see a salesman, et cetera.

In the end, she...

Just to shut them up, she DID agree to see somebody.

A few days later, one of REO's salesmen arrived at Ivy's home.

And having got a foot in the door, the hard selling techniques

outlined in the company's sales bible came into play.

Standby for a torrent

of manipulative jargon and very poor English

It starts with, "Remember, you're not a salesperson,

"but an adviser, paid to do an assessment."

Well, it starts there, because they are a salesman,

they're not an adviser

and they're not being paid to do an assessment.

They're just there to sell goods at as high a price as they can.

Being an excellent salesman takes great skill,

but what these doorstep criminals were doing

was a completely different kettle of fish.

There was no skill involved. Just manipulation

and a step-by-step plan to closing deals.

"Most objections are price. Don't rush your close.

"A quality demo should result in a sale, if they can afford it.

"Keep trying. If you leave someone's house that would benefit from a product

"and you haven't sold it, then you haven't done your job."

Perhaps one of the most worrying ones is when we get to

what they're supposed to say

if they're trying to sell somebody a stairlift. It says here,

"If I were your son, I would be worried

"because it is hard work for you.

"And if you were to have a slip, it could cause a lot of pain,

"if nothing worse.

"And if you were to have a big fall, you could cause a lot of damage.

"If you were in a big pile at the bottom of the stairs,

"how long could you be laid there before someone finds you?"

And that is just clear scare tactics, isn't it?

It's despicable. It's...

Elderly people have enough problems,

especially those with limited mobility.

They have enough problems to deal with

without somebody putting ideas into their head

that they're going to fall down the stairs.

It's almost talking them into it.

And that's exactly what the salesmen did to Ivy for two and a half hours.

But other consumers suffered even longer ordeals.

There was one lady I spoke to. She said,

"The salesman came at two o'clock and he didn't go till seven.

"I know it was seven because I put the telly on and Emmerdale was just starting."

And I think she was just, you know...

she was exhausted because she had gone past a normal mealtime.

Towards the end, she probably would have signed anything.

There were no depths to which they wouldn't sink,

because not only were REO bullying

vulnerable people into buying products,

they were also ripping them off with extortionate prices

and Ivy's case was no exception,

as they tried to sell her a chair for just under £2,000.

She told me the price and it was like,

"That's a lot of money for a chair,

"especially when there's nothing wrong with yours, mum."

So I got on the Internet and checked out a few companies,

all pretty much the same.

Even found one that was £800.

So, to me, they were overcharging quite dramatically.

After many phone calls,

Ivy's daughter eventually managed to recover her Mum's money,

but the ending to this story gets much better than that

and it's all down to people who'd been targeted by REO,

fighting back and getting in touch with Trading Standards.

By the time that we decided we needed to take some firm action,

there were about 30 or 40 complaints registered.

Not all of them serious, but some of them

were sufficiently serious enough that we felt we had to take some action.

Trading Standards obtained a warrant to search REO's offices.

Documents which were seized in the raid

revealed that many of the products they had sold weren't suitable

for the buyer's needs

and that their rip off pricing strategy had generated

an annual turnover in excess of £2 million.

The story hit the headlines of the national press

when the company's directors pleaded guilty to the use of illegal sales practices.

The penalties which we got, which were very stiff,

they're the largest penalties we, in Derbyshire,

have had for these matters.

They're the lowest of the low.

They really are. They...

they are despicable.

They're picking on the most vulnerable...

in society.

The sentences given to the directors of REO

show what can be achieved when consumers make a stand

and Trading Standards have a message for the rogue traders,

cold callers and doorstep criminals who think they can get away with it.

Trading Standards are there.

We're not toothless, we will pursue people.

Um...

We, if we've got the evidence and you are committing offences,

we will track you down.

We will get you to court. And we will deal with you.

Absolutely fantastic stuff.

Now, I've just got time to tell you about Robert Matthews,

who's written in about his work co-ordinating a Neighbourhood Watch.

His advice seems quite sensible to me.

Anyone who calls uninvited at his front door

is told in no uncertain terms

that they're unwelcome, and the door is firmly closed.

Your neighbours must be thrilled to have you working on their behalf, so thanks for getting in touch.

We're here to fight back against doorstep criminals

and we'd love to hear more of your stories about how you've stopped them ripping you off.

You can find all the details about how to get in touch with us at:

So, thank you very much indeed for your company,

and I hope you'll join me again next time.

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