Episode 7 Doorstep Crime 999

We're following your success stories

of fighting back against doorstep crimes, rip-off rogue traders,

cold-calling con men, you name it, we're all united against them.

What's more, we're celebrating the work of award-winning police

and Trading Standards teams.

With your invaluable help, we've been busy spreading the message

that these crooks must be stopped!

Today, I discover more about the astonishing and audacious

charity bag scams, which target good causes and unsuspecting consumers.

The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau have estimated

-there's about £50 million worth of scamming going on.

-50 million?

£50 million, yes.

The extraordinary doorstep art scam

that bit deeply into the pockets of homeowners in Northampton.

I was ripped off on my own doorstep by somebody purporting to be

something that they weren't.

Plus the victims of a heartless gang in Essex,

ripped off to the tune of £150,000.

Rest assured, the crooks get their just deserts!

They're predators and they're preying on the weak and elderly

and taking advantage of someone who's unable to defend themselves.

It's a sad fact that there is no scam or trick too low

for some doorstep crooks, even the theft of charity bags.

But it's also heartening to meet people who won't stand for it,

and show great tenacity in fighting back!

We've probably all received leaflets like this through our letterboxes,

from charities asking us to put out unwanted clothes and toys,

to be collected and sold to raise money.

Bag collections like these provide a crucial source of funding

to hundreds of good causes,

for instance, the Midlands Air Ambulance.

We need to raise over £6.5 million each year

to keep our three air ambulance helicopters operational.

We're reliant on the goodwill of the people

and have been for the last 21 years.

In 2010, the charity discovered that criminals will stop at nothing

in order to make a profit.

About two years ago,

the charity were receiving a number of calls from the public

asking whether certain bags were supporting the air ambulance.

These bags were named Air Ambulance Service, Air Ambulance Support,

all alluding to say they were supporting and giving donations

to their local air ambulance, Midlands Air Ambulance,

none of which were.

Guess what?

A gang had distributed their own mock charity bags.

They were collecting items that residents thought

they were donating in support of the local emergency service.

The charity would normally raise over £200,000 a year

from clothing recycling.

The first year, our donations dropped by nearly 70%.

That's a whopping £140,000 of potential funds,

diverted towards doorstep criminals.

Not only were the ... collectors collecting their own bags,

they were collecting our charity bags and other charity bags,

affecting not only us, but every other charity raising funds

through this method,

costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds.

Unfortunately, what happened to the air ambulance charity

was not an isolated incident.

We've had many communications from you from all over the country

about other charity bag scams.

Warren Alexander, from the Charity Retail Association,

believes doorstep crime

has a devastating impact on charity fundraising in the UK.

How does the scheme work?

It's very simple.

They pretend to be charities, they print up bags that look

as though they might be from charities,

they distribute them across the streets where they're collecting

and then go around days later and pick them up.

But they're also picking up bags that belong to legitimate,

legal, decent charities.

How much money are the charities being done out of?

It's very difficult to estimate what you haven't got,

but the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau have estimated

-there's about £50 million worth of scamming going on.

-50 million?

£50 million, yes.

That is extraordinary and shocking. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

One day, this brave lady, Ingrid, from Wolverhampton,

decided that enough was enough.

Well, I just told them off, I really did.

I told them if they want any money, go and earn it like everybody else.

Later, we find out how she stood up to them

and how the authorities deal out punishments to bag scammers.

Plus one of the more unusual doorstep cons we've seen,

as the residents of Northamptonshire face up to a sneaky art swindle.

I'll never buy off the doorstep again

because you're not always 100% sure that people are saying who they are.

Let's now consider a more traumatic kind of doorstep crime.

We're at Basildon Crown Court in Spring 2012.

Take a look at this charmer, Chris Barnes.

Along with five other crooks,

he conned two elderly victims out of more than £150,000

then blew it all on a life of luxury.

But their crooked spree has come to an end.

This is the day we find out what sentences Christopher Barnes

and his associates will get.

This is the culmination of an investigation

-that started almost two years ago.

-Let's go back a little in time.

The victims of these crimes were too traumatised to share their stories.

But the authorities believe we can learn a lesson from the crooks'

disreputable acts.

Invariably they'll try and befriend the victim

so they'll appear to want to help the victim

and ask them if they need any help with gardening work

or house maintenance work and so on.

That's how the relationship can start but it can turn very nasty

and they will target people that they think are vulnerable to being duped

and who will have assets.

Essex Police began their investigation following a tip-off.

The anonymous caller was concerned

that his elderly and housebound neighbour was being ripped off.

We went to see the lady and she told us that she had indeed

had some minor building and gardening work done,

by what on first glance appeared to be quite a reputable firm

called Chris Landscaping Ltd.

Chris Landscaping Ltd is not to be confused

with other reputable businesses of a similar name.

Despite their frequent visits,

the gang appeared to have done very little work at her home.

Chris Barnes used some very cunning tactics to manipulate this lady.

Chris Barnes has some young children.

He took these children to the old lady's address.

She thought it was lovely that she had some company,

she thought it nice to see these children

and she considered Chris Barnes to be her friend.

All the time this was happening,

he was carrying out very poor-quality work or little or no work

and taking large sums of money from her.

In total, this lady had written them out nine cheques

to a value of £42,700.

Nearly 43 grand, for work valued at less than ten grand?

How dreadful!

It must have been a shock for her, to be conned out of a small fortune

by people who appeared to be her friends.

I think that in my experience, this is probably one of the most

insidious types of crime that we have experienced.

The victims tend to be vulnerable, often living on their own

and often very elderly and it's quite shocking to think

that there are people out there

who are prepared to take away those people's life savings

and have really no regard for the consequences of that.

Then the police investigation into the gang's accounts

revealed a second victim.

This man was 73 years old, he was also housebound,

he was disabled and hadn't left his home for, again, five or six years.

He also had never been married, he didn't have any children,

and apart from a couple of neighbours around the corner

who helped him with his shopping, he also didn't have any visitors.

This gang befriended him in much the same way as they had the old lady.

They also took advantage of the fact that he was housebound.

What they would do with him, is they would knock on his door

and they would tell him that they had done work in his garden,

they'd trimmed hedges, they'd mowed his lawn.

He was unable to check, to see if this work had been done.

These cons took place over six years from 2005 to 2011

and the crooks certainly took their time extracting the victims' cash.

Two neighbours in particular came forward

and said that they had seen people slapping on what looked like water

onto his fence in an effort to look like they were varnishing it.

This helpless man paid them a king's ransom,

for their poor-quality and often non-existent work.

In the end, he wrote out a total of 67 cheques over five years

and these 67 cheques added up to £112,900, I believe it was.

I don't think he realised the full extent

of the amount of money he'd given over in the end.

Over £112,000.

Surveyors later valued these small jobs at just over £7,000.

The financial impact where somebody loses £100,000 or £150,000 or more

can be absolutely catastrophic, obviously.

We've many examples of people who have lost their life savings

to these doorstep rogue traders and they will literally bleed them dry

of every savings they've got.

The gang went to every effort to bleed their victims dry.

As a consequence, they lead a very comfortable life.

The main thing that struck us

when we saw the way that Chris Barnes lived in particular

was the lifestyle he was leading.

He had no mortgage on his home,

his home was decorated to a very high standard, expensive furniture,

he had a fleet of four cars outside his home address,

he had stables at the bottom of his garden.

Their high-living days are at an end,

now that these rotters have felt the full force of the law.

At Basildon Crown Court in March 2012,

Christopher Barnes, Daniel Chuter, Allan Logan and William Brazil

all received custodial prison sentences.

The other two gang members were given suspended sentences.

It's very rewarding to see the fruition of our teams' hard work.

A lot of officers spent a lot of time working on this case

and it's very satisfying to see men who've committed a despicable crime

being sent to prison for the awful things they've done

to these old people.

We're looking to get money back from Chris Barnes,

we've put restraining orders on his property and on his bank accounts.

We're hoping to take money from him

and give it back to the victims of this crime.

A promising result for Essex Police.

As always, thank you for your letters and emails.

Martin from Staffordshire has written to say

that he once had a cold-caller who tried to persuade him

to change his energy supplier.

The excuse was that his existing supplier had gone overseas

and payments were not getting through.

Martin knew this was nonsense because it turned out

the caller didn't know which energy company he was with,

in other words, a chancer.

So it always pays to ask searching questions.

Thank you for that reminder, Martin.

Now, let's catch up with our charity bags investigation.

Snaffling our charity bag donations has enabled gangs of doorstep crooks

to con us, and what's more, dozens of our charities

out of £50 million every year.

But this brave 74-year-old from Wolverhampton

wanted to take a stand.

I've been putting charity bags out for at least five years

and never had any problems.

I saw this van pulling up

and it picked the charity bags up and I thought to myself,

if it's for Great Ormond Street,

they usually have it written all over their van.

But this van was completely... There was no writing, it was blank.

I thought there's something funny going on here.

So I got in my car and went looking for them

and I found them loading bags up further down

in one of the side streets.

I knocked on the window and I told them, "I want the bag back".

They looked at me like they didn't understand what I was saying.

I think I could have hit them really but I didn't, that's too far.

I just told them off, I really did.

I told them if they want any money, go and earn it like everybody else.

Good old Ingrid didn't stop there.

She ordered the rogues to load the bags into the boot of her car,

so that genuine charity collectors could pick them up from her house.

I would advise people to keep an eye open for them on the doorstep

and have a go at them, because if people have a go at them

and stop them, they ain't going to come again, are they?

Now, what of the rogues in the West Midlands,

who took clothes from homeowners intended for the Air Ambulance?

It lost the charity over £140,000 in funding.

An investigation led by the Government's Insolvency Service

revealed that one Anthony Durkin was behind the companies responsible.

David Hill was in charge of the case.

Mr Durkin admitted to us

that no donations had been made to any charity

and all the money the company used, as he put it, in operational costs.

We were told that the clothing was collected in containers

and transported to Poland

where the proceeds from that, we just couldn't establish what had happened,

the money has gone, essentially.

As a result of that,

we petitioned to wind the company up in the High Court

which would have the effect of closing it down

and the company was wound up on 2nd November 2011.

With the company shut down,

Trading Standards mounted their own case against Anthony Durkin.

On the 2nd December 2011,

the charity bag crook pleaded guilty to nine offences

under the consumer protection law at Bracknell Magistrates' Court.

He was ordered to pay fines and costs totalling £5,735.

Since then, we've actually seen, without them being out there,

a significant increase in clothing recycling again

and we're recovering some of the revenues that have affected us

and also other charities nationally.

Warren Alexander from the Charity Retail Association

has excellent tips for those who want to make sure our donations

reach the good causes that need them.

The thing to check for is that it's a charity name you recognise

and is that name and not something similar.

The second thing is to look for a charity registration number

on the bag and to check that number with the Charity Commission,

because the name and the number should match.

If you're at all suspicious, phone up the charity

and make sure they've got a collection in your area.

It's excellent to see the law catching up with the crooks

and our thanks to Midlands Air Ambulance and Ingrid,

for sharing their stories with us.

Here's another example of doorstep crime.

Hello, Gloria. My name's Lynn Munt.

I was conned a couple of years ago on my doorstep

by somebody purporting to sell me paintings

which turned out to be fake.

I want to tell you my story to stop this happening to somebody else.

That certainly sounds interesting. Now, on further investigation,

it turns out that roughly 30 victims fell for this art scam

and we wanted to get beneath the oil and canvas, as it were,

to find out exactly what was going on.

In 2009, residents of Northamptonshire

were targeted by doorstep crime.

Instead of the old trick

of posing as police officers or water board officials,

the rogues elevated their confidence tricks into an art form.

The technique the gang used

was to call at residential houses like these,

at the weekend, Sundays or evening time,

knocking on people's doors

and presenting themselves as art students who originated from Israel.

They would carry canvases like this

and show them to the person who answered the door.

These canvases contained art which these so-called students

claimed to have painted themselves.

But not everything was as it seemed, as Lynne Munt discovered

when she came face to face with the crooks.

There was a knock on the door and there was a young girl.

She showed me a portfolio of paintings

and said they weren't just hers, they were by other students as well.

I had a look through them, my husband had a look and we discussed price.

After taking a good look at the paintings on offer,

Lynne and her husband decided to buy three.

They agreed a price of £235.

I'm not an art expert,

I do know what I like and I liked the look of the paintings

which is why we decided to buy them and pay what we did for them.

£235 for three paintings doesn't sound too bad.

But thanks to the Trading Standards investigation,

Lynne has found out that they were in fact cheaply imported paintings

which the bogus students were passing off as their own work.

Since then, she's given two of them away

and keeps the remaining one out of sight.

I don't like to keep the painting on show.

I can't bring myself to even get it framed,

for the reason that it makes me feel so gutted about the whole story.

I keep it in the cupboard all the time.

And that's the painting.

The paintings looked genuine to me

because of the fabric that they're painted on

and the actual texture of the painting, it's like brush strokes

and it just looks real because of the texture.

Every time I look at the painting, I remember that I was ripped off

on my doorstep by somebody purporting to be something that they weren't.

The paintings looked pretty convincing to us too,

so we took them to an art expert, Neil Duguid,

to find out exactly what Lynne had got for her money.

OK, the first thing that comes to my attention

is that it's not a canvas, it's nylon

and it's quite plasticky which is indicative of mass-produced fare.

Opening it, I can see it's quite an attractive floral picture,

but it's very formulaic.

It's probably painted by two or three people.

One person will have the red paint, one will have the yellow paint,

another person will have the green and in a conveyor,

one will do a little bit here, another will do a bit there.

At the end of the day, you get quite an attractive picture,

but it's not by one specific artist, I wouldn't have thought.

So much for this being the work of a hard-up art student.

But Lynne paid £235 for this and two other paintings.

Have they any value?

Yes, I guess so.

If you liked the picture enough and you thought it was worth that,

not everybody is an art valuer and not everybody knows the pitfalls.

If someone brought this to me and asked me the value of it,

I'd say it's got decorative value but no actual monetary value.

It's the kind of thing we see quite regularly

where people have been abroad on holiday and brought back mementos.

They're the kind of thing you'd expect to pay very little for

in the country that it was made.

In fact, these pictures were painted in China.

They can be ordered over the internet and, including shipping,

cost around £18.

A far cry from the £70 those bogus students were charging.

Here are some more examples of the art in this doorstep fraud case,

seized by Northampton Trading Standards.

We were keen to find out what you think of them

and whether you would be taken in by the high prices.

I think it's quite nice, I like the colours.

It's a good painting, it's got texture.

It's very colourful, very expressive, quite fun as well.

So how much do you think they're worth?

About £30.

No more than a couple of quid.

£200-£700.

How much?!

When we revealed that these pictures can be picked up for just over £18,

and yet people had been charged around £65, you were astonished.

Wow, that's a rip-off!

I think it is daylight robbery.

Yeah, they're being ripped off if they're paying that price for it.

How did Northampton Trading Standards

discover this doorstep crime?

It was all thanks to a local businessman,

who thought he'd found the perfect deal when he spent £250

on five paintings.

He decided not to discuss his purchases with us on camera,

but Ian Smith remembers his story very well.

He bought some paintings from a chap and when he left,

he thought there was something not quite right,

so went online to find out a bit more about the sellers.

While online, he found a website that belonged to a Chinese wholesaler

and while looking at this site,

he recognised some of the pictures he'd been shown that evening.

The victim was angry and disappointed

in that he'd bought something that he had understood to be one thing,

the artwork of a charming individual he'd invited into his house,

when in fact he'd discovered it was a mass-produced piece of artwork

that could be bought by anybody from a website in China.

Trading Standards mounted an undercover operation,

to catch this gang of crooks in the act.

One of the things that had been handed to the victim

was a telephone number for a chap who could frame pictures.

Ian asked the customer to arrange a meeting with the picture framer.

When he arrived expecting to secure some work,

he was greeted instead by Ian and the police.

It seemed as if he'd been in league with the dodgy art gang.

Once the police had arrived, I searched his car,

found records in his car that related to other jobs he had to do

in relation to framing pictures.

I contacted a number of people that were listed there

and these people had, not surprisingly, also been visited

by persons purporting to be art students.

Some of them were female and some were male,

so clearly there's more than just the one chap at it.

If these bogus students had managed to scam £250

off each of those other victims, the scam could well have made them

thousands of pounds, simply by targeting good-natured residents.

Without enough evidence to charge him,

the framer was released with a caution.

The gang selling the paintings are still at large

but Ian has words of caution for anyone who finds themselves

being offered a deal too good to be true.

My advice would be, if you do find somebody on your doorstep offering

to sell you artwork like this, would be, do you know this person?

Are you likely to see them again should there be a problem?

You might want to know a little bit more about the people selling to you,

what their name is, what their address might be,

some sort of ID would be a good idea.

But generally speaking, I would advise not to buy at the door,

because if you do get a problem and you do part with money

to a doorstep seller,

you may find it very, very hard to catch up with them.

Clearly these frauds can be committed in many guises.

We should never take anything we're sold on the doorstep at face value.

Before we go, Ann Humphries of North Wales sent us various examples

of cold-caller patter she's heard over the years

which made her alarm bells ring.

For example, being told that she has to act fast to get an amazing deal,

being told you can pay whatever way you want, cash, cheque or both.

And number one hate, being called love.

Nobody likes being patronised!

Thank you, Ann, for sending those details.

The purpose of this programme is to fight back

against doorstep criminals

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

You can find all the details about how to reach us at bbc.co.uk.

May I say, thank you very much for your company,

I hope you join us again next time. From all of us, bye-bye.

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