Episode 12 Fake Britain

Welcome to a world where nothing is quite as it seems.

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Get down!

-Put your hands behind your back now!

In this series, I'm going to be investigating

the world of the criminals who make their money at your expense.

And I'm going to be showing you how not to get ripped off.

Today on Fake Britain - the takeaway pizza restaurants

fooling the public by faking their ingredients.

It's not ham as in...

-Pork.

-Pork.

-Pork.

The fake letting agents cheating people

out of thousands of pounds and leaving them on the streets.

'I met four other people who were waiting for the same flats'

at the same time for the same keys.

And the fake burglar alarm company

conning pensioners out of thousands of pounds.

The more elderly and vulnerable the person was,

the more money they would charge.

Mis-selling food is a criminal offence.

It's extremely dangerous and it is happening every day across Britain.

Today, Derby Trading Standards are out tackling

a kind of food fakery that you might not expect...

Pizza.

It sounds unlikely, but pizza is big business,

with people in the UK spending £749 million a year

at their local takeaway

and over 90% of households eating it at least once a week.

The pizza industry is flourishing, and everyone wants a slice.

But for some retailers, the attraction of the pizza market

is so great that they want to sell it

even if it means they have to fake it.

Evidence has come to light that takeaways across the UK

are using fake ham on the pizzas,

and Paul and Gabrielle from Derby Trading Standards decided to investigate.

I did a test purchase exercise

where I visited numerous establishments throughout Derby

and was purchasing pizzas which had toppings on described as ham.

The pizzas were tested to check that they were using ham

instead of a ham substitute, and the results were surprising.

We took ten samples altogether from a number of different establishments

and of the ten samples, nine of those came back as not ham,

as turkey on the pizza rather than ham.

You might think that you'd be able to tell the difference

between ham and turkey,

but the turkey product that takeaways across Britain are using

looks very similar to ham and you may have eaten it yourself.

But it's not OK to sell something

that only LOOKS like what it's supposed to be.

So trading standards sent out warnings

to the takeaways in their area.

We went out and did some revisits

and sent some letters out to our traders

to give advice and information

surrounding the sale of takeaway food and menu descriptions.

All the takeaways found to be doing this bizarre mislabelling

said it was because they are halal

so they don't want to handle pork products,

but they also don't want to advertise this fact

since six of the UK's top ten favourite pizzas

have pork products on them.

So a pizza restaurant that didn't sell pork

would be at a clear commercial disadvantage.

We don't really mind what they put on the pizza

as long as they are describing it correctly,

so if they are putting turkey product on the pizza,

as long as they describe it as a turkey product then there isn't an issue,

and similarly, if they want to describe it as ham,

as long as they put ham on the pizza then that's perfectly fine as well.

It's four months since the takeaways received their warnings

and now it's time to revisit the offending restaurants

to see if they've cleaned up their act.

It might be worth you going in first

-and just grabbing it and then we'll walk.

-Yeah, OK.

-Hi, there.

-Hello, there.

My name is Paul King. I'm from trading standards.

There's my identification.

Paul explains that they're here to check

that what they're putting on their menu

is the same as what they're putting on their pizzas.

Cos I can see that you've got the turkey next to the ham

on the Hawaiian, but obviously you would need to make it clear as well

that that applies to the ham on the Napoli as well.

After their warning, this shop has made an attempt to make some changes,

but Gabrielle thinks there's still more they need to do

to fully comply with the law.

The issue is purely about describing things correctly.

Gabrielle asks the manager to show her the ingredients they're using.

Halal turkey julienne, so really what you should be describing it as

is exactly what it says there - turkey julienne.

The guidance we would always give businesses

is to apply the description that you've got on the product

that you've got from the wholesaler.

Customers should never be misled

into believing they are buying something that they are not,

especially where food is concerned.

What you need to be aware of

is that some people may have an allergy or intolerance to turkey,

and if they see ham on the menu without turkey

and they're thinking that it's pork, they could have a reaction to that

and that's what we're trying to avoid,

so that is more the issue than anything else.

They label and bag the pizzas, give one to the shop,

keep one for themselves and one will be sent to the public analyst.

On to the next shop. Perhaps this one will fare better.

And is this actually ham that's on the pizza, or is it...?

-It's Turkey.

-Right, OK.

It's not ham as in...

-Pork.

-Pork.

-Pork. It's not that, it's turkey.

The word "ham" can only be used to describe pork.

-Because we're not allowed to eat pork.

-Yeah, you're halal.

And the reason for that is that we can't sell that here

then it would be wrong... Everything would be just halal.

Yeah, no, no, I understand that.

I appreciate that, that obviously you are a halal establishment,

but there's no problem with you having turkey and not serving ham...

-But don't call it ham.

-Exactly.

-That's it.

Like all the others, this shop is halal

so they don't want to serve pork products,

but they still want their customers

to believe that they have it on their menu,

so they continue to label their pizzas as ham.

They've quite clearly broken the law

and then a decision will need to be made,

once the pizza comes back from analysis,

as to what action we take next.

If there is a history of offences by that business

then it's more likely that we'll take a harder line with them.

The team move on to a third shop

which has been warned in the past for serving fake ham.

-Hello, there.

-Hello.

-I've got an order to collect.

We are doing a formal sample as part of a project on pizza.

And once again Gabrielle and Paul find them serving

a turkey substitute instead of ham,

but the manager thinks he's got an excuse.

He claims the business has just changed hands

and the new owners weren't aware of the situation.

So when did he take over ownership of the business?

The third week.

And his co-worker thinks that having only been here for a few weeks

will get them off the hook.

Yeah, OK.

Yeah. Yeah.

OK.

OK, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. OK.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happened.

-We were here in the summer and we bought pizzas.

-In summer?

Yeah, and then we came back in October and advised the business.

And unfortunately now that is why this is a formal sample.

But Gabrielle has noticed that there is a hole in this story.

The reality is, the name of the person on the wall,

on the public liability insurance,

has at least been there since October last year

and that is when we were out advising businesses,

so it's a difficult situation

and obviously we will be able to confirm who owns the business

and how long they've owned the business,

and it may well be that although that individual,

the manager there tonight, hasn't had advice,

the business itself, the business entity, has been advised.

Out of the three pizza shops visited,

only one has shown any signs of improvement

and the other two have completely ignored trading standards' warnings.

Yeah, I am disappointed,

because when you go to speak to people you really, kind of,

hope that they're going to take on board what you are saying

and there were some businesses that we visited,

because we both visited last time,

there were some businesses that I thought,

"They're not listening to us,"

but there were some businesses that we thought,

"They are listening to us,"

when actually it looks as if we may have been proved wrong

in relation to the businesses we visited tonight.

In the battle to stamp out fake ingredients being used on pizza,

all of the shops are now facing legal action.

Thank you.

Burglar alarms are usually what we use

to protect our homes and keep us safe.

But when the fakers get hold of them,

not only do they not do their job properly,

but they also cause a whole load more problems.

When Dennis Heath was contacted by Pentagon Security

about having a burglar alarm installed,

he'd already heard of the company.

The Pentagon company I have known for a number of years,

because I used to work in security for a number of years

and I had come across them.

Graham Carling was contacted by Pentagon Security

when they told him that they had taken over the contract

of his current alarm system and that they would need to reinstall it.

I first heard of Pentagon Security when they arrived out of the blue

to say that they were taking over from 24/7 Security.

Apparently, Pentagon had taken them over about 12 months before

and they said they would be running the monitoring and so on.

But Pentagon Security were not who they said they were.

They were trading on the reputation of this legitimate company -

Pentagon Fire & Security of Birmingham -

by unlawfully using their name and logo.

Attracted by what seemed like a bargain,

Dennis was tricked into using the fake Pentagon company

for his home alarm system.

The original contract price was just over £2,000.

With the deductions and discounts, we came down to a figure of £1,131,

which, for what was supposed to have been installed,

was an excellent figure, an excellent quote.

And Graham was cheated into buying what

he thought was a top-of-the-range system.

I eventually estimate that I paid the best part of £3,000 to them

for various bits and pieces.

But it wasn't long before the fake Pentagon's shoddy work practices began to show up.

About three months after the system was installed,

I noticed that my monthly telephone bill

had moved from £30 a month

to between £200 and £300 a month.

It got to a stage that the supplier would allow me

to receive calls but I couldn't make calls till I'd paid the bill.

But the problem with Graham's phone line turned out to be actually

a problem with his burglar alarm, which was faulty

and had been phoning the monitoring station every three minutes.

But fake alarms that didn't work wasn't the only way the fake company deceived their customers.

Dennis decided he wasn't happy with the pressure being put on him to pay

by direct debit, so he decided he wanted to cancel his contract

and get a refund, but when he contacted the fake company,

he, too, hit problems.

I rang his office.

He wasn't there...so I said, "Right, will you please tell him

"that as from now, that contract is cancelled, with immediate effect."

I gave him...I think it was seven days in which to respond. Nothing.

Sandwell Trading Standards had started receiving complaints

and it seemed like the complainants had one thing in common.

The victims were all of a similar sort of age.

Our average age was about 71.

It became quite apparent that the more elderly

and vulnerable the person was, the more money they were charged.

We found out from our investigations that these alarms

cost between £200 and £300 off the shelf.

They're being marketed as a tailor-made system

and to some people, they're being sold for anything up to £3,000.

And when the genuine Pentagon company got in touch with

trading standards to let them know that people were contacting them

with complaints, it was clear how widespread the problem had become.

There is a genuine company called Pentagon Security Systems,

which are based in Birmingham

and who have got no connection whatsoever with this case.

Unfortunately, some of our victims,

when they were trying to get an engineer

or some sort of recompense actually contacted this company,

and they were good enough on occasion to tell us

that they'd received calls and there was another company

operating in the same area using their name.

And the fake company weren't only trading on the real Pentagon's reputation to sell their alarms.

They also produced newspaper articles to

terrify their elderly and vulnerable victims into buying their products.

More than one victim said that they'd been shown press cuttings

relating to elderly people who'd been attacked in their homes.

When we executed warrants at the business premises,

we found a number of press cuttings that we believe were used on these occasions to scare people.

And trading standards also found that several key elements

of the security system that the fake company had been selling

were promised but never delivered.

We recovered a large number of contracts which people

signed in relation to these systems, and there are a number

of disturbing features that we discovered when we looked at them.

One of the first things was that they claimed it was

a tailor-made intruder alarm system when we know for a fact

that it was bought off the shelf for between £200 and £300.

Also, they claimed it was installed to British Standard

when, again, it wasn't.

Graham's problem with his phone bill was soon resolved once

the matter was in the hands of the trading standards.

The trading standards officer severed the link from the alarm

to the telephone and that was the end of the problem with the distorted bills.

When it became clear that their attempts to resolve the complaints amicably

weren't working, trading standards began to gather statements and prepare a criminal case.

When we went to court, we had approximately 30-odd victims

who were prepared to go to court and give evidence.

There were many more victims that were too elderly,

too confused or unable to make a statement of complaint

in these cases that we couldn't use.

We know the company sold over 100 systems to people

in the time they were in business,

and every one of those, potentially, could have been a victim.

Harjit Kalian and his partner Ajay Chopra

earned around £100,000 from their bogus security company,

and the more that Gerry and his colleague looked into the con,

the more disturbing they found it.

They very soon realised that they could make

a lot of money by targeting elderly vulnerable people

and, to me, those sort of people are the lowest of the low,

in terms of criminality.

After pleading guilty to 22 counts of fraud,

Harjit Kalian received four-and-a-half years behind bars

and his partner, Ajay Chopra, was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

Happy about the fact that he had gone down, and he wasn't going...

for at least four-and-a-half years,

he wasn't going to pester anybody else.

I'm bitter about...I lost so much money...

..and I suppose I'm angry with myself for being perhaps gullible...

..um...and falling for their soft talk.

When it comes to buying or renting a property,

we put our trust in the property experts,

but what happens when those experts are fakers who just want your money?

Sophie Ocollier,

a French marketing executive working in London was looking for a flat

in Spitalfields in the East End

and thought that she had found somewhere that was just perfect.

I'd been looking for two months so I visited quite

a lot of flats in the area - rubbish flats, nice flats but too expensive.

This one was really nice because it was brand new

and it was not that expensive.

It was about £910 per month, without bills.

Sophie took photos while she viewed the flat

so that she could show her friends and family.

Properties in this area of London are highly sought-after,

so Sophie quickly decided she wanted to secure the flat.

At the letting agent's office, everything seemed to be above board.

Everything seemed very professional.

The business cards, the outfits, even the website was a real website.

I checked if the agency was registered and it was,

so everything really seemed clear to me, so that's why I gave them money.

Sophie signed on the dotted line and handed over the deposit

and the first month's rent, totalling £2,000.

But what Sophie didn't realise was that the letting agent she'd been dealing with were fakes.

They'd gone to enormous lengths to construct this elaborate lie,

including renting a temporary office in the same

building as lots of legitimate companies, creating a website,

registering their company and renting the flat that Sophie

had visited from the real landlord, who runs the shop downstairs.

I mean, we were letting out the apartment

and he seemed like a reasonable client at the time,

so we did the necessary checks, looked at his passport,

bank statements, took copies and let it out to him.

Detective Sergeant Mark Simmons from the City of London Police

took on the investigation.

They placed an advert online over a period of around seven days.

Because they'd priced the flat also at much below market rent,

it attracted an awful lot of interest.

And a lot of viewings for a cheaper-than-normal property meant

a lot of tenants for just one flat,

all expecting to move in on the same day.

The worst day of my life.

I went to the agency and I met four other people who were

waiting for the same flat at the same time

for the same keys.

So we were calling the estate agents, but they didn't answer.

We asked the receptionist to open the doors of the office,

which she did, and we discovered that everything was gone.

It was empty. No desk, no phones, nothing. Nothing was there.

When I saw all the people waiting for the same flat, I thought,

"Oh, my God! That can't be happening!

"It can't be true!" It was such a shock, really.

I felt stressed,

hopeless, homeless

and, yeah, I didn't know what to do.

Sophie had arrived at the flat with a van full of her possessions,

as had several of the other supposed tenants.

It was now up to the police to establish who these fakers were.

We were very fortunate in that two of the victims had almost

inadvertently taken photographs with their phones of the interior

of the flat and, fortunately for us,

they'd also captured the image of a suspect.

One of the guys who was unfortunately stung,

he was outside, he actually showed us a photograph

and we confirmed that that is actually our tenant.

With the names of the fakers confirmed, Mark set about finding

them by getting their pictures published in a national newspaper.

Through that, obviously, we were able to do our own work

and find addresses for these people, find out where they'd been

prior to this, what they'd been up to,

and it sort of led to the successful arrest of one of the individuals.

After pocketing upwards of £20,000 from all the people they'd deceived,

Tawfikur Rahman was sentenced to 14 months in prison

but his colleague remains on the run.

Their fakery left at least ten people without somewhere to live

and some of them thousands of pounds out of pocket.

The situation left me with minus £2,000 on my account,

so it was hard to recover from that, and, yeah,

the past six months have been hard for me, yeah. Definitely.

Mark Denton is a plumber, based in Derby.

To get from job to job he relies on his van.

A van to us is possibly the most vital part of equipment that we use.

It's got to start every day,

it has got to take us to and from jobs.

In need of a new van, Mark began scanning the trade magazines

for a good quality, affordable, second-hand vehicle.

He didn't realise it, but he was about to become the victim

of a faker, one that would cost him thousands

and drive him round the U-bend.

I found this particular vehicle,

the price looked attractive, the mileage looked attractive.

Mark called the seller and arranged to go and view the van.

The vehicle seemed perfect,

so Mark and his company went ahead and bought it.

I was really chuffed.

It was the type of vehicle I had wanted for a long while.

But all wasn't as it seemed, and Mark started to notice problems with the van.

After a few months, we started getting little issues with it.

Why is it using so much oil?

It seems heavy on diesel.

Mark decided to get it checked out.

I took it to our local mechanic, who gave it a check over

and found that there was a lot of worn parts on the vehicle that,

with the mileage it was showing, shouldn't theoretically be worn.

Mark couldn't understand why

a van that had only 80,000 miles on the clock had so much wear and tear.

But the truth was about to be revealed.

Nicola Schofield is a manager

at Nottinghamshire County Council Trading Standards.

Around the time Mark bought his van,

Nicola's team had been receiving complaints about other recently purchased vans breaking down.

As the complaints came in, it was obvious they came from the same trader, from the invoices they had.

They had all got the same trading name, from the same company.

The company was the Premier Van Centre Nottingham,

and the person who'd sold the vehicles was this man,

Maxwell Alvey.

Nicola set out to put all the evidence together

and try to solve the mystery of why all the vans bought from

the company had problems.

She discovered Alvey had bought most of them from the same auction house.

'We asked the auction for a list of all the vehicles

'that this particular trader had sold.'

And then we got in touch with the Auto Trader,

because we knew that some of the vehicles had been advertised through the Auto Trader.

Nicola cross-referenced the auction house's records

with Alvey's adverts in Auto Trader.

There was a crucial difference.

In every case, the mileage in the adverts was a lot less than

it had been when the vans had been bought by Alvey.

After we contacted the auctions,

we realised that Mr Alvey had sold 111 vehicles with a reduced mileage.

There was only one conclusion -

the mileage on all those 111 vans that Alvey had sold had been faked.

And it made every one much more valuable.

The odometer on each van, the device which registers how many miles

each had travelled, had been tampered with.

In other words, the vehicles had been clocked -

and on a breathtaking scale.

Mr Alvey had knocked over a million miles off the total amount

of vehicles that he had sold.

It was one of the biggest fake mileage operations ever uncovered in the UK.

Nicola and her team meticulously tracked down all 111 victims of the fakery.

Mark Denton was among them.

By now, he had spent some £1,500 on repairs to his van

and the real condition of the vehicle had revealed itself.

There is a lot of rust that has appeared on the bottom of the doors,

little scabs have appeared all down the sides of the vehicle,

the bonnet, particularly, that has appeared with tiny

little spots, which, now I see them, obviously

are probably stone chips from motorway mileage.

Mark was astonished to discover that his van had actually done

an extra 200,000 miles.

The clock had been wound back a jaw-dropping amount,

the equivalent of travelling eight times around the world.

I mean, we was absolutely astounded, you know.

We couldn't believe that we had been, basically, conned.

The actual speedo reading states 103,000 miles,

but actually it's done 303,000.

Who would want to buy a vehicle with 303,000 on it? I certainly wouldn't.

When Nicola and her team arrested Alvey,

they made an astonishing discovery.

He was running a production line of fakery.

Odometers were being rolled back and vehicles resprayed,

to sell them on for vast profits.

We found a lot of paperwork relating to the sales of the vehicles.

He had 12 vans actually on the premises

and only four of those hadn't been clocked.

We found a lot of equipment on there for painting the vehicles,

and we also found a computer, which did contain software

that would be capable of clocking vehicles.

In the past, people could do it by hand and turn the odometer back.

But now that we've gone digital,

a lot of it is done with computer software.

Maxwell Alvey pleaded guilty to ten counts of fraud.

His fakery is estimated to have earned him over £100,000.

I am happy that, you know, he has finally been brought to justice,

and let's hope we get some compensation off this gentleman.

Who would want to buy a van with over 300,000 miles on?

So, to us, it's scrap, basically, and it's cost us £6,500.

That's all from Fake Britain today. Bye for now.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd