Episode 13 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

In this series I'm going to be investigating

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

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

Coming up, the man who turned detective

and caught the faker who stole his identity and £7,000.

Once I did capture him I thought, "Got the... B!"

The fake power tools that could be in your garden shed

and the people that put them there.

They are actually linked to a highly dangerous Italian Mafia faction.

And we meet the people conned into the fake lorry driver's course.

I felt empty, and just a bit lost, really,

about the fact that what had been promised to me

was just not there any more, and had in fact all been lies.

On Fake Britain we've extensively covered the influx

of fake alcohol that's been flooding Britain.

You may think of it as a cheap drop of booze,

but as we've seen time and time again, it's anything but harmless.

This is the result of a fire set off by the manufacture of fake booze

at an illegal alcohol factory in Lincolnshire.

It killed five people that were making it.

It's not just dangerous to the fakers.

The lack of official safety standards,

means dodgy liquor has killed people across the world.

In a bid to disrupt the UK trade in bogus booze, this morning,

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs are in Peterborough.

Everyone, this operation today is a joint operation.

We're going to be testing the compliance of revenue traders

and retail outlets in the area.

We're looking for goods where duty has not been paid.

So cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol.

The problem of fake booze has escalated to such an extent

that in some areas of the UK as many as one in four

off licences are breaking the law.

It's a crime wave that's costing the country £1.3 billion

a year in lost taxes and could put your health at risk.

Trading standards are also looking at the possibility of revoking licenses.

And if we come across counterfeit goods,

they will be dealing with those.

If there's no questions, let's get to it.

First stop is this corner shop in Peterborough where Paul

has already discovered Bacardi and whisky with fake labels.

A couple of bottles here,

one of the bottles has got a label which appears to be genuine.

The other bottle has a label which is counterfeit.

And they appear to have removed the original label

and put on their own label.

There's signs of a change of label on there

to suggest that it's a UK duty paid bottle when it clearly isn't.

We've got a bottle of Bacardi rum here which indicates

that it should have been for export,

for the export market,

but they've placed what appears to be a counterfeit duty stamp

on the label to suggest that it's UK duty paid.

For every 70 centilitre bottle of spirits, like whisky,

sold with a fake label, the public purse is robbed of more than £7.

Suddenly, Paul gets a call about a discovery of more

suspected fakes in a shop across town.

That's genuine, it's nice and tight.

This looks counterfeit, this Golden Virginia, definitely counterfeit.

They're clearly not duty paid.

And some of their goods here we believe are probably counterfeit.

It's very difficult to tell sometimes

whether or not we're dealing with counterfeit goods.

The packaging is often very high quality, which in turn means

that the goods inside are likely to be very poor quality.

Paul believes there's a direct link between the gangs that

smuggle counterfeit goods and other large scale organised crime.

Those who are involved in the selling of illicit tobacco

and alcohol are also involved in things like people trafficking

and drugs and other serious crime.

Later, more corner shops selling fake booze that could kill.

This actually could be hazardous to health.

It could have methanol in, it could have industrial alcohol.

This is Steve Bloomfield, a roofer from Hemyock in Devon.

He's only ever had one credit card in his life

so when he got a bill from a credit card company saying

he owed them more than £7,000, he was surprised and worried.

They obviously thought I owed them that

but I knew I owed them nothing at all.

The figure that I was potentially owing

would come with another letter then,

saying they've got 48 hours to act or the bailiffs would be arriving

within 24 hours and final demands.

The credit card company could only offer one explanation.

She told me that somebody would be intercepting my mail

is the way that this card would have been took out.

Steve was very concerned.

Someone had taken out a fake credit card in his name

and racked up a debt of over £7,000.

He was a victim of identity fraud.

I asked my neighbour just to keep an eye out

if he did see anything, and sure enough, a black 4x4 pulled up

and went into my property.

What I did was I set a trap on my gate.

I just simply had a piece of concrete, a bit of stone,

and put on the corner of my gate here to make sure then

that if somebody was coming into my mailbox, taking my mail,

that the actual stone as you open the gate, the stone would move,

and then obviously when I would come home of an evening I would come back

and have a look and I could see that the stone had been moved.

Steve's concerns about someone stealing his post

had been confirmed, but he needed proof

so he decided to turn detective.

Once we knew someone was definitely coming to my property

I went to the local superstore and bought a CCTV little camera.

It's quite a simple little object which allowed me

to put this in the gutter of my conservatory

so it was filming directly two or three meters

away from where my mailbox was.

It done the job what I wanted it to do, basically.

When I can home the second day

and actually captured a person on there, it was, "Woah!"

You almost know you want to capture somebody on the other hand,

you're not really wanting to see somebody, if you now what I mean.

Once I did capture somebody, I thought, "Got the... B!"

Steve's DIY surveillance camera had captured the faker.

It was time to take his evidence to the police.

Alison Berry is a detective constable.

When I first saw the CCTV footage that he brought in

to the police station, I was actually quite amazed.

He got right out of his car and went right into his post box.

It was obvious he was stealing his post.

Identity theft, in this form, I've not come it across before.

And Steve's footage had not just captured the faker's face,

he'd also recorded the man's car registration number.

Once the police actually had it, they looked at it and they could tell

the plate from the footage, you know, so it was really good.

Using this information,

Alison was able to discover the identity of the faker.

It was serial conman Kevin Castle, someone with 18 previous convictions

for 72 offences as a faker.

As we approached the house, there is quite a log driveway down

and he was actually in one of the fields at the time

and I immediately recognised him as being the person from the CCTV.

A search of the property revealed Steve was not the only

victim of credit card faker Castle.

What we have here is the biscuit tin that was fond

buried in the hedgerow in the back garden

and inside this biscuit tin were all the documents.

People's post and credit cards.

Kevin Castle had used the fake credit cards

to pay for a life of luxury.

It was a large house with some acreage of land, stable block

and there were horses there.

The furnishings were, I would describe them as high spec.

There wasn't anything cheap in that house.

Everything was best quality.

There were several plasma TVs.

Horses, horse equipment quad bikes, just things like that,

expensive items.

Kevin Castle had targeted a number of people

whose post box was outside their property.

His MO would be that he would obviously find a house

that he thought was quite affluent and probably had good credit rating

with a post box that would be away from the main house.

He would then rummage through the post box and obtain

either bank account details or personal details

he would then do some research online

and find out more information about the person as in date of birth.

He'd then go online to the credit card companies,

use all the details he'd obtained

to fill in the online applications

and then he would go back collect the card from the post box.

He would know how long it would be before he PIN number arrived

and he would go back and get then PIN number.

But after Steve's crime busting camera work

and Alison's investigation, credit card faker Kevin Castle

was sentenced to four years for stealing £100,000.

Meanwhile, Steve has moved his post box.

Which unfortunately means our postman has to get out of his van

and walk to our back door, now.

Power tools can be dangerous at the best of times

but when they're fakes imported from China

and being distributed in Britain, the results can be deadly.

Previously on Fake Britain we looked at fake chainsaws

being sold in Dorset.

They were cheap counterfeits of legitimate models

made by German manufacturer Stihl.

We took the fakes to an expert from Stihl,

and were shocked at the results.

Bar and chain comes back towards the operator at full speed.

Wherever it touches, face, shoulder or neck,

is going to suffer a severe injury or possibly even death.

This looks a very cheap plastic.

In the pendulum test, this broke off.

If that were to happen whilst somebody was using it,

their hand could drop down onto the chain with severe consequences.

We thought these Dorset fakes were just an isolated case

but since then, there's been a major and deeply disturbing development.

Because it turns out the power tool fakers' tentacles

stretch across Europe.

And not only might the power tools in your shed be fake,

but the people that put them there, might very well be

from Europe's most feared organised crime syndicate, the Mafia.

This is just part of an 800 tonne haul of fake tools

imported by the Camorra, southern Italy's Mafia.

Astonishingly, they and their fake power tool trade

even visited the UK, as Chief Inspector Todd Clements

of the Police Service of Northern Ireland discovered.

Well, we received a telephone call from a local resident

to say that there were men trying to sell chainsaws door-to-door.

They were swarthy skinned, Italian sounding

and wearing black leather jackets and certainly offering a

two-for-one on deal on Husqvarna chainsaws

is certainly not something you get round here very often.

Having two southern Italian guys selling stuff in rural

Northern Ireland is completely out of the norm.

I believe they were trying to sell them for about £430.

Buy one, get one free.

International criminals require cross-border policing

and Todd knew his counterpart in Belgium had already taken action

against a crime gang selling the chainsaws in his country.

We have good relations with Chris Van Steenkiste.

And it's through our links with Chris we alerted him

to the fact that these chainsaws were being sold in rural Ulster.

Chris now works for Europol and he gave us the inside story

on how the international counterfeiting ring was smashed.

After some investigation,

we found the place where it all started in Belgium

and where the mastermind was preparing his sales

and the trade to his Italian colleagues.

Stamping out the illicit trade in Belgium led to Chris

discovering the same thing was happening across Europe.

When we raided his premises, we seized a lot of goods,

a lot of labels of famous brands.

And we also found out that there were a lot of links to other

countries like France, Germany, Spain, Poland and so on.

In each country there was a mastermind

sent out by the Camorra, that's the Mafia in Naples,

that he would send out to each country.

We also received one in Belgium.

And he was organising the whole picture in a country.

So he was responsible for everything.

I was in contact with my Northern Irish colleague.

And so he knew the phenomenon.

And apparently, some minor cases popped up in Northern Ireland too.

And he immediately understood what was behind

and could undertake some measures.

They initially tried to tell us that they were just cheap chainsaws

but after we did our enquiries with Husqvarna, and with Europol,

it was quite evident that they were counterfeit and they made admissions

in relation to the fact that they were counterfeit.

These men were arrested and were later convicted of the offences.

While Todd swiftly dealt

with the chainsaw-selling Camorra on his patch,

in Europe, careful planning was required

to close down the counterfeiters.

A joint operation led by Europol and Eurojust, in Europe,

in 10 different countries.

And some 800 tonnes of goods were seized.

800 tonnes of goods were, of course, not only chainsaws,

but we found drill hammers, we found power tools,

screwdrivers, fake knives and so on.

Seven criminals were arrested, 11 million assets

were confiscated and four million euros on bank accounts was blocked.

The chainsaws weren't just fake, they were also extremely dangerous.

It will function as a chainsaw

but a number of the safety features on Husqvarna chainsaws are missing.

And so it could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands.

The fakes being sold in Ulster are almost identical

to the fake chainsaws we previously found in Dorset.

They have similar safety features missing.

Luckily, Europol officers

took swift action against the power tool fakers.

These are the Camorra leaders behind the deadly trade in fakes

being led out of their lair in handcuffs

by the Italian financial and fraud police.

Criminal organisations,

they don't sell fake goods because they love a Louis Vuitton bag.

No. They sell the fake goods because they know

they can earn even more money than selling drugs, cocaine and so on.

We're trying to show the link in Northern Ireland

between counterfeit products and both organised crime and terrorism.

That they're not just sold by well-meaning Del Boys

to make a few pounds

but they are actually linked through to the Camorra,

a highly dangerous Italian Mafia faction.

Fake Britain has been out with the teams

cracking down on the explosion of fake booze

finding its way into the nation's corner shops.

Here in Brighton,

fake spirits have been a serious problem for about a year.

We're out with Trading Standards officer Catriona Macbeth

and police licensing officer Lara Baldwin.

The first of today's raids is the result of a tip-off.

We've had some intel so we're going to go and have a look

and we're going to have a look at their spirits.

One of the reasons we're here today

is obviously just to do a general licensing check.

We also want to have a look at your alcohol

to see what alcohol you're selling at the moment as well.

Just as in Peterborough, the team are looking for fake duty labels

because if you can't trust the label,

how can you have any faith that the spirit inside won't be faked

and even dangerous to health?

It's very important that we do tackle this.

Potentially, bottles can look very, very genuine

but it's harmful to health and that's what we tackle.

Fake vodka is cheap and easy to produce

which is why it's so high up the list of fakers' favourites.

But now even relatively exotic drinks like the Turkish spirit raki

can be found with fake duty labels.

We've got two different types of raki which the issues

here are that the duty stamps are actually false, they're fake,

so again it indicates duty and VAT hasn't been paid.

So these are going away with me.

Cat and Lara leave the shop with as many as eight bottles of raki,

as well as the more familiar haul of 16 bottles of vodka,

a drink we've seen faked before.

Before they do though, there are further checks that need to be done.

So the reason why we're shaking the bottles;

sometimes if they've used screen wash or other chemicals

and we shake it, it will stay frothy for quite a long time,

but there's nothing to indicate there's a problem with that.

One of the reasons Cat is suspicious about these bottles of vodka

is that yet again they have fake duty stamps on the back,

but how can she tell that they're not the real deal?

So I've just lightly scratched the duty stamp

and what's happened is the fluorescent has lifted off

so you can see the blue underneath.

It shouldn't do that.

The duty stamp number's false

and also the actual duty stamps themselves are false.

You know, it's worrying.

It's worrying because this isn't something you can do at home.

This level of sophistication

indicates the involvement of organised crime.

The format of a duty stamp is quite difficult to replicate

or to falsify and the counterfeiters are getting it so good now.

It used to be that they were unable to get the stamps to fluoresce

now they're actually being able to produce duty stamps

and labels that fluoresce correctly.

-I can prove everything to you. That is there, now.

-OK.

-There's everything there. I haven't done anything wrong.

-OK.

With booze flying out of the door without anyone buying it,

the shopkeeper's starting to get hot under the collar.

I need you to take a deep breath and stop talking so much, all right?

Cat has good reason to be taking these bottles away.

Everything is false, there's also no known address for the producer

so we don't know where it's actually made.

And the problems are this actually could be hazardous to health,

it could have methanol in, it could have industrial alcohol.

We won't know until we actually send it off to the public analyst.

It's also duty evaded so it's smuggled.

Cat believes she knows the reason behind the boom in fake booze.

Smuggled alcohol, there's more money in that now

than there is in dealing with illegal drugs

so a lot of the organised crime the gangs have moved

from drugs to actually importing and distributing the smuggled alcohol.

Next stop, a shop Cat's had problems with before.

It's quite a small shop so it doesn't appear to have an awful lot

of stock but they have got a massive stock room down in the basement.

So we're going to be going down and having a look at that as well.

We might find stuff down there that we don't find in the shop.

I'm Cat Macbeth from Trading Standards.

We need to do a licensing check...

While Cat checks the bottles on the shelves,

Lara is off into the storeroom to hunt for illicit alcohol.

Alarm bells are ringing.

Lara's worried about the whisky she's found

and hands it over to Cat for a closer inspection.

It gives the impression it's Scottish whisky.

The name, the labelling, the name of the producer

and the address is in Scotland.

But this is actually a fake whisky, it's not produced in this country,

it's definitely never seen Scotland.

Made elsewhere and I'm aware that there have been issues

with this and it can't legally be sold as a whisky.

So we're going to be seizing this because it isn't whisky, it's fake.

Across the UK the Scotch Whisky industry

supports as many as 45,000 jobs

and it accounts for a quarter of all our food and drink exports,

making it a massive earner for the UK.

Fake whisky like this is a real attack on Britain's finances.

And the fake whisky isn't the only thing confiscated.

Cat and Lara also take away 17 bottles of vodka

and six bottles of gin.

All the shops claimed they weren't aware they were selling fakes.

We've been coming up with quite a major theme

of a lot of bottles of spirits where the duty stamps are fake.

So it could be something in there that's really, really dangerous

and potentially could kill somebody.

To discover how big Britain's fake booze problem really is,

we went to meet public analyst Paul Hancock.

He's sent bottles by trading standards officers

from all over the country.

In the last six months we've seen an explosion in the number

of fake spirits that have come in to the laboratory, mostly vodkas.

I would say probably last year we may have only analysed

about 20 samples and this year it will be up over 100 and

each one of those samples represents potentially a batch

of fake drink that is released on to the market

for the average consumer to drink.

And while the price from your pocket may be smaller,

the cost to your health from consuming these drinks

could be enormously high.

You only have to drink tiny amounts of cheap industrial alcohol

to cause yourself real damage.

If you consume neat methanol

then that's very harmful to your health.

And it would only take approximately 10mls, which is less than one shot,

of this substance to actually start causing you damage to your eyes.

And 20 to 25ml, so the level that's typically in one shot,

is potentially enough to cause death.

Later, we're back with HM Revenue and Customs,

cracking down on the smuggling rackets

trying to flood the country with fake booze.

They were making a delivery of what looks like wine,

beer and possibly spirits.

Car clamping might be one of the most unpopular professions

in Britain, but at least most of its practitioners operate legitimately.

But while it's one thing getting clamped because you parked somewhere

you're not allowed to, it's another thing altogether

when you're clamped illegally by a rogue clamping company

whose only motive is taking hundreds of thousands of pounds

of our money to line their pockets.

Helen May works in the operating theatre

of her local hospital in Worcester.

I was going to a night out with some friends from my work

and we parked the car to go out for a meal,

not far from the city centre in Worcester,

and as we got out we checked that there was no parking restrictions.

I was quite happy where I'd left the car.

But Midlands Parking Contracts,

not to be confused with any company of a similar name,

weren't so happy with where she'd parked and decided to clamp her.

They said they gave fair warning they were operating on the site,

but in fact, they'd placed their warning sign

so high on the wall that no one could see it.

Then about two hours later we came back and I'd been clamped.

I was very angry. There was two of them there.

There was one very, very big built man who never actually spoke

but the fact that he was there was intimidating enough.

I also didn't know if they were legit because they were

a little bit dishevelled looking, a little bit dirty looking,

and I thought, "I don't know if these guys are real or not.

"Am I being robbed?"

Helen's friend went to get £125 to pay the clampers.

When she came back, one of the chaps,

he just lunged forward grabbed the money out of her hand.

And of course all the time I'm thinking,

"This is robbery, this is robbery."

I couldn't get over it.

We were both left stunned and upset, both of us upset.

I was frightened, I was frightened, no doubt about it.

Midlands Parking Contracts even targeted people

that shouldn't be clamped at all.

Lesley Bridgewater is registered disabled and uses a wheelchair.

Her car was first clamped

and then towed away as she slept at her partner's home.

It was in the morning when he got up ready for work

that he opened the front door and asked where my car had gone.

After calling the police, she discovered

Midlands Parking Contracts had removed her car.

I shouldn't have had the car lifted.

My blue badge was on show,

there's a stick in the back of the car

and plus it's on the tax disc as well that the car is a disabled car,

a mobility car, and they still lifted it.

Clampers operate under licence from the Security Industry Authority

but they can lose their licence if they clamp or remove a car

when the owner is displaying a blue badge.

That didn't stop Midlands Parking Contracts lifting Lesley's car.

And without it, it was a struggle for her to get home.

Then when I got here I took some painkillers

and then I started phoning,

still upset that my car had been lifted

and I'm thinking, "Well, why has it been lifted?"

I had to phone up the clampers

and they told me it's £335.

Well, it was just a sinking feeling because I hadn't got that money

and I'm thinking, "Well, where am I going to get the money from?"

Getting upset, I was crying, I had to phone family

to see if they could help me and my friends.

They all rallied around for me and got it and then I'm thinking,

"How am I going to pay them back?"

The way she did that was to spend less money

on essentials like food and heating.

Because I'm missing meals, I need to have a meal because of the tablets

I take so I was taking tablets on an empty stomach I was feeling sick, I was going dizzy

and I was just sitting upstairs crying my eyes out.

I thought, "This is all them, this is really all them."

And I'd just go to bed every night crying.

How could they sleep every night, knowing that you've deprived

a disabled person of a vehicle that she needs to get out and about?

I said, how can you do it?

Lesley and Helen are just two of the 1,500 people

who contacted police

to complain about Midland Parking Contracts' fines.

Detective Sergeant Mark Roberts spoke to the fakers' victims.

As soon as the motorist was leaving their vehicle

and out of the line of site, they would jump out of their vans

run over and be putting clamps onto the vehicle.

Sometimes the motorist would park for such an insignificant

amount of time that by the time they returned back to their vehicle,

the clamper was still putting or trying to secure the clamp

to the wheel of their car.

Charging fake fines for clamping is illegal

and earlier this year six people from the company

were convicted of conspiracy to defraud.

The fraud they've committed is false representation.

They've put themselves up as a legitimate business

and the false representation is that they're recovering

inflated amounts of money when they were not entitled to do so.

One of the clampers even used a fake name

to try and throw the police off the trail.

But Mark's hard work paid off.

We were able to identify all of the managers and the people

practising clamping techniques for Midlands Parking Contracts.

All six defendants were convicted of fraud and all six

received custodial sentences which we were incredibly pleased with.

Whether it's the big wheels or promise of a steady,

in demand profession, getting a heavy goods vehicle licence

to become a trucker is an increasingly popular job option

that attracts thousands of new recruits every year.

Only thing is, to get one, you've got to be trained

and then pass a test.

And if the training course you take turns out to be a fake,

you'll have paid thousands of pounds for absolutely nothing.

Chris Orange had already had a taste of life as a trucker

when he decided to retrain as a lorry driver.

He thought it could provide him with the job security he was looking for.

My uncle is a lorry driver, as a kid I used to go away on trips with him.

I used to really enjoy that. And it was just the laugh of it all,

getting to see different places, obviously driving the big truck.

Johannes Meyer also wanted a UK HGV licence,

and went looking for a suitable training company

that would guide him through an unfamiliar system in a new country.

I used to be a HGV driver in South Africa.

We had a family business.

But the licence in South Africa doesn't apply in the UK,

so I had to redo it.

But it was Johannes' wife Angela who arranged the training.

I'm the force behind, you know, the marriage, basically.

-Oh, are you?

-Yes, I am.

That's amazing, I never knew that. Oh, I was sort of aware of that.

And so I decided that it's time for him to do his licences,

he needs to start working.

Chris, Johannes and Angela, chose as their training company

Highlife LGV Ltd based in Canary Wharf in London.

They were just some of hundreds of people

attracted by the company's advertising.

I did a Google search,

and at the top of every search in Google was Highlife LGV.

The way it was marketed was that you would sign up for them, initially.

You'd pay the full amount to them, which I think was £3,500.

They would book the first part of the course, the theory test.

Once you'd done that, they would then book the second part,

the driving test.

They had good connections with lots of different companies,

and there was a guaranteed job at the end of it.

Which was what drew me to the company.

It just seemed like a very easy way to get into

the job of being a truck driver.

Angela came across Highlife LGV online.

She purchased a package she thought would take the worry

out of the training process.

That cost £2,597.

It was a massive decision for us because it was a lot of money.

And there was a lot of pressure on us, basically.

So it was very tough at that stage.

Money was tight for the young married couple

starting life in a new country

so they paid for the course using a credit card.

With debts to pay, they needed Johannes to start earning

so they were desperate for him

to move through the process as fast as possible.

So basically, we phoned them up to book his theory test.

He studied, obviously, and he got 98%.

So he really passed, you know, quite well.

Chris also got off to a flying start with his theory test.

I turned up at the centre, was quite nervous about the test.

But at the same time, quite excited because of what they'd told me

this was the first step in going into a new job.

I'd done so much work for it that I passed it first time.

But after this strong start worries soon began to surface

as the trainee lorry drivers moved from the inexpensive

theory test to the expensive driving lessons.

My boss at that time well, I promised him

that I would get my HGV licence so I could start driving trucks for him.

So he's waiting for me to get my HGV licence,

and I'm waiting for Highlife LGV to, you know,

to put the wheels in motion so that we can get it done.

Those wheels were moving very slowly

and Chris was having similar problems.

I was then on the phone to them the same day, saying,

"Yes, I've just passed the theory test,

"when can I get on and do the driving part?

"Because I want to do the driving part now."

But I didn't hear anything concrete, and that's when the problems started.

The phone number that I had for them was disconnected.

The money had gone, there was no course,

no-one was answering the phones.

I was frustrated.

I felt empty and just a bit lost, really,

about the fact that what had been promised to me

was just not there any more, and had in fact all been lies.

We started realising, "No, something's massively wrong.

"You know, we need to try

"and get hold of somebody that can actually help us."

It was becoming clear the training courses

Highlife LGV were offering were fakes.

With nowhere else to turn, Chris, Johannes and Angela

contacted the local Trading Standards.

We started receiving complaints from consumers about a business

offering large goods vehicle training.

We received at least 90 complaints.

But that's always an underestimate

because not every person complains to us.

So we would have probably estimate it would have been 400 to 500.

They were getting a theory test

but they weren't getting the expensive part of the deal

which was the practical training at the driving centres.

Chris had a special reason to regret

ever getting involved with Highlife LGV.

A large proportion of the money that I used was left to me

by my dad who'd passed away.

I think he wanted me to use it when I was old enough and wise enough

to use it for something that was useful and productive.

And so that's what I thought I was spending the money on.

And then spending the money on something that actually turned

into nothing was devastating in the end, because it wasn't my money.

And that was what made it very difficult to deal with.

For Chris, it was the end of a dream.

All the stress of getting ripped off, losing all that money,

just completely turned me off the whole idea.

And I just didn't want to do it any more, basically.

Not being able to afford the fees

and having to put the cost on a credit card

turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Johannes and Angela.

After we got our money back from the credit card company,

we went on and I got my licences,

and I'm now a fully qualified lorry driver.

Highlife LGV is no longer trading

and the owner was successfully prosecuted.

Fake alcohol is a massive, international criminal trade.

The world's largest organised crime gangs

are involved in it and it earns them billions every year.

And while you might think it's not something that affects you,

in fact, it's all too possible that you could be coming

face to face with it when you go shopping at your local corner shop.

Out to disrupt this criminal trade

are Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

Today, they're hitting the customer-facing side

of the fake booze business in Brighton, checking shop shelves.

They've barely started and already they've found more fake whisky.

Right, I'm leaving you a visit note.

The Dexter's whiskey can't legally be sold.

It can't legally be sold because this Spanish concoction

is fake whisky and about as Scottish as a chorizo playing the castanets.

This particular bottle of whisky that we've been detaining

this morning, it's an issue for Trading Standards

and they'll be taking it away to have a look at it.

We're just going to another shop now,

because we think the team have got counterfeit alcohol.

Probably counterfeit vodka.

So we're just going to go in and have a look.

Well, what we've got here is Soviet vodka,

which is not a well-known UK brand.

And when you look at the bottles, there are no duty paid stamps on it.

So that is a very good indication that it has been smuggled

and it will be counterfeit.

So we will be seizing this from the shopkeeper.

Sometimes they won't be openly on display.

But they'll have the counterfeit goods, or the smuggled goods,

under the counter.

I think we've seized approximately six cases,

36 bottles of vodka.

It wasn't on sale. But that's not surprising.

It could be that the shopkeeper was due to sell them

but hadn't priced them up and put them on the shelves.

But often when we go into shops, we find that the illegal goods,

whether it's tobacco or alcohol,

are often kept and hidden under the counter

and are sold to regular customers.

But it looks like the fake vodka isn't just for sale in one shop.

At another location in the town, they've found another six bottles.

It's exactly the same as we found before in another shop in Brighton

earlier on this morning.

So the chances are that whoever is supplying it may very well be

touting it around the shops in Brighton and offering it for sale.

While the authorities do all they can to get fake and non-duty paid

alcohol out of the shops, what they really want is to cut off

supply from the organised criminals that peddle it to small shops.

And today, it looks like they may be about to get a lucky break.

Just as we arrived at this particular shop, a white van arrived

and lo and behold, inside the white van they were making a delivery

of what looks like wine, beer and possibly spirits.

The authorities suspect the person driving this van

will be the middleman in a much larger smuggling operation.

In this case they're not convinced by what he's told them.

The operational officer who spoke to the man

works undercover and can't be shown.

A very shaky story, really.

The guy delivering it says he picked it up basically in the street, a lorry site in Barking.

Nothing more to say than that.

Spoke to the owner. Hasn't got much more to say. Says he knew the bloke.

He approached him around Christmas time. Cheap wine.

This is the first delivery.

He hasn't paid for it. He hasn't got any paperwork.

So as it stands, seize the goods, seize the vehicle.

The HMRC officer's suspicions were raised by a large

quantity of wine being delivered in a hired van.

This is the wine. This is part of what was in the van earlier on.

There's a lot of spirits and beer and wine still left in the van.

And it's not just the wine causing concern.

Part of the load we've got here are bottles of Glen's vodka.

Now, looking at the bottle and looking at the labels,

the labels are pretty definitely fake.

They are counterfeit labels.

It could be that they're putting counterfeit duty paid labels

on smuggled vodka,

which means that obviously the duty hasn't been paid,

which makes them cheaper potentially at retail.

But certainly these will be fake, because they're fake labels.

The fake labelling equipment behind these bottles doesn't come cheap.

To put them together takes large, organised crime outfits.

It's part of the reason the authorities crack down

so hard on all sides of this trade.

Activity like this is happening in every town and city in the UK.

It's a good end to a good day

fighting the battle against Britain's fake booze.

We've visited a large number of shops in the Brighton area.

We've made a large number of seizures.

We've seized things like counterfeit vodka

and we've seized vodka with counterfeit labels on the bottles.

Yet more proof Britain is facing a tsunami of fake booze,

sometimes dangerous to your health,

and always designed to line the pockets of criminals

who don't want to pay their taxes.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd