Episode 2 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Get down! Get down now!

-Get your hands behind your back now!

In this series, I'll investigate the world of the criminals

who make their money at your expense

and I'll be showing you how not to get ripped off.

On today's programme, we have exclusive access

to the world's largest operation against fake medicines.

Police! Stay where you are!

We tell the tale of the fairy fakes as a master forger is finally caught.

I thought he had terrific nerve to come to me and let me do the tests in front of him

because they could only show the picture was new.

We bring you the story of Britain's biggest ever holiday villa fraudster.

It was really the perfect international crime.

Danny Lee-Frost is head of operations at the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency - MHRA.

Danny and his team are engaged in a week of dawn raids across the UK, part of Operation Pangea,

an international campaign to target criminals behind the supply of fake medicines. This morning,

the team are in South Wales.

We'll be looking for some very strong, powerful sleeping tablets

and also some weight loss and some counterfeit erectile dysfunction medicines.

Danny and the team arrive at the property and join forces with the local police.

This is the one. OK, let's jump out.

No-one is answering the door, so there is only one thing for it.

Police! Stay where you are!

The police wrestle the suspects to the ground.

SHOUTING

Female officer, female officer!

The police have used the ram and forced entry and now we've got entry teams,

followed by a search team, going into the premises and looking for counterfeit medicines.

The suspects are kept under guard in their living room as officers sweep through the house.

They find evidence of drug use

and exactly what they've been looking for -

fake medicines and evidence of dealing.

There's quite a large quantity of cash here on the premises.

There's also evidence of possible drug dealing with a list of names and quantities and amounts of money.

The suspects are led away and the drugs and evidence is brought out by Danny and the team.

OK, we've got something that's described as Russian Cialis. I've not come across that one before.

We've got some counterfeit Viagra, a laptop computer.

We'll look at that to see who he's been taking orders from and who he's been sending for.

There has been an extraordinary development at another address being raided.

A man who lives in an old people's home has been found storing significant quantities

of another drug banned in the UK. He is also arrested.

Next, it's off to a third address, a friend of the first man.

We're from the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency.

We have a warrant to search your premises.

Officers enter the property. The man is upstairs under the influence of drugs.

He's obviously completely off his head on something. He can hardly speak.

The man is led away and medicines bagged, tagged and brought out.

We have one person arrested and we have recovered a quantity of what appears to be generic diazepam.

That's an illegal copy of a powerful prescription drug.

They need to be sent to our laboratory for analysis.

Nimo Ahmed is Head of Enforcement at the MHRA and central to co-ordinating Operation Pangea.

The initiative actually started here in the UK in 2006

when we had an internet day of action

and that's grown to an international internet week of action

where this year we saw over 80 countries involved and over 165 agencies involved

in the targeting of the illegal online supply of medicines.

As well as targeting suppliers, Operation Pangea is focused

on stopping fake drugs getting into the country.

Here in the Midlands at Britain's largest postal hub,

the UK Border Agency are intercepting suspect packages from abroad.

We can tell by the shape and colour that these contain medications.

Suspect packages are brought inside

and examined by the MHRA and representatives of genuine drugs companies.

Quite a lot of them we suspect to be counterfeit Viagra. There's about 2,000 here.

That's a street value of almost £10,000.

There appears to be 1,400 packets, each containing four tablets.

That's a street value of over £20,000.

To confirm the drugs are counterfeit, samples are taken from the suspect packages and tested,

using the MHRA's state-of-the-art, new mobile testing kit.

In Operation Pangea 2011, we deployed for the first time purpose-made equipment which allows us

to test in the field for counterfeit medicines.

The good thing about that piece of equipment is it cost nearly £40,000.

We've paid for that out of proceeds of crime generated from prosecutions.

The machine holds a database of 3,000 different legitimate medicines.

A suspect pill is analysed and it takes just seconds to compare it against bona fide samples.

The results are clear. It's a fake.

As the day progresses, the team find more counterfeit medicines bought online, flooding into Britain.

Later in the programme, we reveal fake drugs are also getting into the NHS

as we meet the lady who unwittingly took them.

Well, I panicked because I thought, have they done harm that I couldn't reverse?

She could have been taking something that was poisoning her.

Anti-fraud agencies around the world estimate

that between 10 and 50% of all artworks are counterfeit,

but it can be almost impossible to prove conclusively a work is a fake.

Rupert Maas is an art dealer based in London's West End.

This is my art gallery. I deal in Victorian and British paintings.

Rupert was approached by a man wanting to sell him this painting

he said was by the Victorian fairy painter John Anster Fitzgerald.

He said his name was Thwaites and that the painting had belonged to his family

and had come into his family as a result of a settlement of a debt.

Rupert found the painting enchanting.

I thought it was absolutely marvellous. It's called The Miser

and the fairies are stealing his money. It's his worst nightmare.

Victorian fairy paintings are highly collectable and can go for tens of thousands of pounds,

but Rupert didn't immediately buy the painting.

There was something about it that didn't quite ring true, the colour, particularly.

And the surface had a very, very thick layer of varnish on it.

Rupert had the picture examined by a local restorer.

He said he thought it was a genuine 19th century piece,

so Rupert bought the painting and sold it to a client.

He already had quite a good collection, so it was going into that.

He was absolutely delighted with it.

Later that year, Rupert was offered another Fitzgerald painting. This time, he decided not to buy it.

Those same alarm bells were ringing and this time I listened to them.

I had to go out to an underground car park at Reading station, I think it was,

to look at this picture under quite difficult conditions. It all felt wrong, so I didn't buy it.

But it wasn't until Rupert saw the third new Fitzgerald painting to come on to the market,

Poppies With Imps And Fairies, that he realised his previous mistake.

This time, this was a fairy on a poppy. It was smaller.

It had exactly the same problems, again slightly suspicious circumstances of sale,

and the colour and the surface.

The point was this time, when I saw that, I thought, "This painting is wrong."

What it did was kill the other two.

They both came tumbling down in my mind. I realised I'd made a terrible mistake buying the first one.

Michelle Roycroft is a senior investigator at the Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit.

Alerted to the possibility of Fitzgerald fakes, she retrieved the first two paintings.

This is the second painting, Going To The Masked Ball, which sold at auction for £88,000.

You will be able to see the incredible detail and intricate figures.

Some of them are quite ghoulish which was very typical of John Anster Fitzgerald.

Michelle decided to pay Robert Thwaites a visit.

He had an early morning call from the Art and Antiques Unit and very quickly,

we found his studio which was in a barn at the back of his home address

and it was like walking into an Aladdin's Cave.

There were Victorian paints,

there were books, including Eric Hebborn's The Forger's Handbook.

There were pieces of cutting of old Victorian newspaper.

Michelle took the work back to Scotland Yard.

We painstakingly went through every single piece of paper, looking for evidence,

and whilst flicking through one of the notebooks,

I came across a photograph of a poppy

which was an exact match for the poppy which appeared in the centre

of the third painting on the market, The Poppies With Imps And Fairies.

Michelle also found a tracing of the flower.

She handed everything over to their specialist photographic laboratory.

We had the image and we were able to lay over the tracing which matched the photo exactly.

And as you can see, again, it's an exact match.

But Thwaites insisted any resemblance between the photo and the painting was coincidental.

Michelle needed more evidence to prove the forgeries.

Expert restorer Hamish Dewar was asked to examine the works to see if he thought they were fakes.

Hamish conducted a simple test using a mild solvent and a cotton bud.

If the paint comes off when rubbed lightly, it's a new painting.

You see on this picture, which is genuinely 19th century,

I just get a very thin film of dirt,

but the pigments themselves, the paint layers are not affected at all,

whereas on the supposed Fitzgerald in question, the paint immediately dissolved,

leading me to suspect very strongly it was a new picture.

Hamish was convinced they were fakes, but Thwaites still denied the paintings were forged.

He admitted restoring the works, but insisted they were real paintings by John Anster Fitzgerald.

Mr Thwaites was able to say he had restored the paintings.

Certainly with The Miser that he had said had been damaged during the Blitz,

he had a perfectly good excuse as to why he had carried out this restoration work.

Thwaites' brother even visited Hamish's studio to try and convince him the works were genuine.

He said the picture was he and his brother's only inheritance from their father,

this would be financially ruinous for them.

I thought he had terrific nerve to come to me and let me do the tests in front of him

because they could only show the picture was new. He believed he could convince me otherwise.

To prove conclusively they were fakes,

Michelle needed to show the bottom layer of paint, as well as the top layer, was new.

To do so, she called in scientific analyst Dr Nicholas Eastaugh.

This is a small electron microscope. This is a technique called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Nicholas uses precise scientific techniques to determine the date works of art were created.

The work sees the worlds of art and science combined.

We've got samples from Pompeii.

That is a small sample of vermilion from Turner's palette.

Dr Eastaugh examined the works Thwaites claimed to be by Fitzgerald.

I sampled all the different, obvious kind of colour areas,

so you've got blues and greens and yellows and reds.

What I found in this case was rather an odd mixture.

There were some things that we would normally associate with 19th, early 20th century paintings.

We might pick out a colour called emerald green.

Cleverly, Thwaites had used some Victorian paints.

However, Nick then took samples right from the bottom layer of paint

and found evidence of titanium white.

Each of these specks is an individual particle of titanium white.

The basic issue with finding titanium white in a painting,

especially if it's supposed to be a Victorian painting,

is this wasn't introduced until the 20th century.

We really don't find it in paintings before the 1940s or '50s,

so it's absolutely not something Fitzgerald would have used.

To find a pigment like titanium white in this painting essentially spells out that it's a fake.

The fact titanium white formed the base layer of the painting

was the final nail in the coffin for Robert Thwaites.

It was finally proven these were fake fairy paintings.

Thwaites was jailed for two and a half years. The case was a triumph for the Art and Antiques Unit.

When they all pleaded guilty, it was a great feeling of satisfaction.

But the forger Robert Thwaites can perhaps be heartened by one thing.

The man who had bought The Miser from Rupert considered it the finest fairy painting in his collection

and demanded it back.

The man who bought this from us absolutely loved the picture

and at the end of the story, Thwaites had gone to prison,

we were able to get it back from the Metropolitan Police and it went back to the owner.

Now it's with his family who absolutely love it.

I wonder if even Mr Thwaites can take some satisfaction in that?

One of his pictures is greatly admired and enjoyed.

We all look forward to going on holiday,

but what if, when you arrived at your destination, your accommodation didn't exist

and what if you turned out to be one of hundreds of victims of Britain's biggest ever holiday fraud?

This next case will shock you.

Peter White and his wife and daughters run a catering business in Grayshott, Surrey.

Every summer, the family travels down to their caravan in the south of France for a well-deserved rest.

But in the summer of 2010, disaster struck.

On my birthday, 15th of June, we got notified that there was a huge flood in the area

-and the caravan, everything, had been lost.

-The family were set to celebrate Peter's 60th birthday,

so undeterred, Peter went online and discovered a great deal on a villa in St Tropez called Villa Lily.

Up popped this wonderful villa owned by a Conrad Bull,

sent him an email, next morning, had an email back saying, "It is available."

Peter thought it was strange the villa was still available,

but Conrad Bull had a plausible explanation.

One of his friends had said he'd like to have it for the whole season,

but with the banking crisis, the guy had been made redundant

and he was left with the villa unrented for the season,

so literally, I was his first bite.

Peter paid just over £6,000 for two weeks.

Everything was ready for a great family holiday and Conrad Bull seemed like the perfect owner.

Another email said, "My wife's going to be down there. If there's anything you'll need, let us know."

And he said, "When you come in from the pool, can you dry your feet because there's a marble floor?

"I don't want anybody to slip and have a nasty accident."

I thought this was great. We were almost getting into a relationship system with him.

We were already thinking about the following year, that we could use this guy's villa.

It was to be the first family holiday staying in glamorous St Tropez.

Peter's daughters Harriet and Alex travelled down to the south of France three days early.

They were eager to get to the villa to decorate it for their dad's arrival,

but there was a complication.

We were really excited, thinking, "We're really close now. The villa must be just around the corner."

The instructions said the girls should look out for metal gates.

I'm sure they look wooden. I'm sure they're not metal.

-Then we see these ones.

-Yeah.

-But it's not Villa Lily. It's Le Caladou.

L'Orangerie. It wasn't that one.

There were six villas located along the road, but no Villa Lily.

The girls rang a bell on one of the villas and spoke to a maid.

We checked the address with her on the directions

and she said, "Yeah, this is definitely the right address, but I've never heard of Villa Lily."

Your heart's sinking. You're hoping, "No, she's got it wrong, it must be somewhere."

Then the girls spotted a postwoman at the bottom of the road.

-We said, "If anyone's going to know..."

-She's going to know, yeah.

I went and spoke to her and she just looked at me and said, "I'm terribly sorry.

"There's no such villa as Villa Lily in St Tropez."

In desperation, Alex called her dad back in England.

I got a phone call from my daughter on the Thursday morning,

saying, "Dad, there's no villa here," and that's when we first realised that we'd been had.

I think we just realised that we had booked a fake villa,

a villa that didn't exist, by a guy that was a fake.

The girls decamped to a cafe in the town centre and desperately tried to reach Conrad Bull.

But there was no reply.

He had vanished with the money.

Determined to salvage the holiday, the family found a replacement villa in the south of Spain.

The girls drove 1,500 miles to get there

and it cost the family an extra £6,500.

The whole experience caused a lot of stress and worry.

It hit my wife especially hard. She had terrible sleepless nights.

In total, the Whites were £12,000 out of pocket.

Later in the programme, we discover they weren't alone.

The Whites were part of the biggest fake holiday fraud the UK has ever known

and it was uncovered by a Sussex policewoman.

The only way to stop this man from further crimes was to put him away.

It's a dark, wet morning in North London

and the MHRA enforcement team is getting ready for another raid on a suspected fake medicine dealer.

We've got a door entry unit with us,

a team leader and one investigator.

And we're just shortly off on our way.

The signal is given. Today's raid is just one of many

during a week-long campaign against the criminals who bring fake medicines into Britain.

Once at the property, there is no answer from the suspect's flat.

-'Please wait. Your call has been programmed.'

-Blimey! Very posh.

A neighbour lets the unit into the building and they make their way to the suspect's door.

-He is refusing to open it and the officer gets ready to force entry.

-Open the door, please.

Finally, someone comes to the door.

-Good morning.

-Good morning.

-I'm from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency.

We've got a warrant here to enter your premises.

Danny believes there to be a large supply of fake drugs at the address.

Any product that could end up on a pharmacy shelf is of great interest to us, so that's why we're here.

Danny's suspicions are confirmed. Inside the flat, fake drugs are found

and a man is led away to the police van.

Danny explains why fake medicines are such a concern.

When counterfeiters make these tablets, it's very much like baking a cake.

They put all the ingredients in a big hopper, but these aren't pharmacists.

Sometimes they do it in a cement mixer, so you end up with something that is pure active ingredient,

or the other end of the cake mix which is just pure bulking powder.

You just don't know when you open a pack of these counterfeits

whether one tablet will do any good or the next one will kill you.

The team carry out the haul, ready to be tested and then destroyed.

We've probably got in excess of 1,000 counterfeit tablets here,

several hundred unlicensed products.

The total value of all this is probably in excess of £15,000.

It's a good day's work for Danny and the team.

The drugs are seized and another online dealer selling fake medicines is stopped.

Intelligence for raids often comes from investigators working within legitimate drugs companies.

Phil Cottrell is director of security at Sanofi.

He and his team conduct test purchases online which lead to arrests of those manufacturing

and supplying the drugs. Today he's investigating a worrying new trend among the counterfeiters.

What we have here are some packages

which have arrived via an undercover agent. We've made a purchase which we believed

was coming from China, and we were quite surprised to see that the labels

show it had arrived from Germany. Deutsche Post.

Phil knows the package actually came from China because he paid dollars to a Western Union address in China.

-There are also tell-tale signs on the packaging.

-The organisation behind the counterfeiting

have been able to circumvent the Customs controls by labelling it as if it had come from Germany.

The drugs are labelled Plavix, a prescription-only drug for serious heart conditions,

but Phil can see the difference between fakes and genuine tablets. They will be sent for testing.

Just back from the lab are some fake Stilnox tablets Phil also ordered online, again from China.

Stilnox is a powerful prescription-only drug for psychiatric problems and insomnia,

but these fakes, destined for the UK market, have some worrying additional ingredients.

When you look closely at the tablets inside the blister strips,

you can see that there's some black dust. We've had these analysed

and I can say that this black dust is residue from a coal-fired power station

close to the manufacturer in China.

Clearly there are chemical compounds in that dust which are carcinogenic.

And that is not the only dangerous thing in the tablets.

It doesn't actually contain the real active ingredient. It contains melatonin,

which affects the pigmentation in people's skin, as well as making them drowsy,

so it gives the effect of a sleeping tablet, but is highly carcinogenic.

Few people in Britain know more about fake medicines than Dr Graham Jackson. He's on a mission

to stop people buying prescription drugs online without a prescription.

About 80% of all drugs bought online from non-registered pharmacists

without a prescription are fake.

-Dr Jackson believes few people grasp the scale of the problem.

-This is a multi-billion-pound industry.

It's run by drug gangs, partly Russian, partly Chinese, partly Indian,

and it is actually now more profitable to counterfeit Viagra and all those other things

than to sell heroin.

Even life-saving medicines are being faked and sold as real around the world.

We know that 50% of sub-Saharan anti-malarial preparations are fake.

We knew that we were getting fake Tamiflu at the time of the epidemic.

We know there are fake oncology drugs so people are not getting the cancer treatment they think.

The scale of this problem is huge.

Counterfeiters who knowingly deprive people of life-saving medication,

there's no difference from manslaughter.

Dr Jackson believes that if people knew what had been found in drugs bought from online pharmacies

not requiring a prescription, they'd be less likely to use them.

Pure amphetamine, which could kill a heart patient, brick dust, talcum powder,

arsenic, various other drugs. Then the tablet is made shiny with road paint or polish.

And then you ingest it. You're going to take one of these?

You must be absolutely mad.

But what if these fake drugs weren't just available online?

What if they were getting into the NHS? As one of Dr Jackson's heart patients proves, they are.

-All right, aren't they?

-Yes, they're fine.

Doreen Wilson is 80 and lives with her husband Lawrence in Kent.

Due to a replacement heart valve, she has to take a daily dose of a cholesterol-lowering drug, Lipitor.

Without it, cholesterol would quickly clog her arteries, causing a heart attack,

but one day the couple realised Doreen's drugs were fake.

I happened to read that a batch of these tablets

had been put onto the market with a particular false serial number.

I thought I would check with my wife's tablets.

Much to my horror, when I checked them

I could hardly believe my eyes. The same batch number was embossed

into the metallic covering of the tablets.

-Doreen's reaction was understandable.

-I panicked a bit

because I thought, having taken some,

have they done harm that I couldn't reverse?

You just wonder how many people don't bother to check that recall number

and are taking them.

Like many of us do, Lawrence had picked up Doreen's prescription from his local chemist.

Little did he know the fake drugs had found their way onto pharmacy shelves across Britain.

Fortunately, Doreen had taken the tablets for just a week and suffered no adverse reaction,

but had Lawrence not read the paper that day, he may never have discovered

that his wife's life-saving drugs were fake.

If one attempts to buy them from email, one might expect

this sort of thing to happen, but when you buy them from a reputable pharmacy

it's frightening.

Mrs Wilson was lucky in that the drug company identified the problem

and Mr Wilson checked the batch number. If they hadn't spotted it,

their cholesterol would have gone back up again. Elevated cholesterol

can increase the chances of getting heart attacks and strokes.

These people who are counterfeiting this are threatening people's lives.

It is estimated that 1% of all drugs on the NHS are fake.

In April, 2011 this man, Peter Gillespie, a chartered accountant from Windsor, Berkshire,

was jailed for eight years for importing two million doses of counterfeit versions

of cancer, heart disease and psychiatric drugs

and packaging them to look like the real thing. 100,000 doses were given to patients across Britain.

Half a billion pounds' worth of fraudulent motor insurance claims are detected annually in the UK.

Cash for crash is a serious problem. It involves staging fake accidents

and then making fraudulent insurance claims. It drives premiums up for honest policy holders

and puts other motorists at risk. One gang who made £2 million from fake crash claims

were jailed for a total of 12 years at Southwark Crown Court.

The ringleader Samsul Haq received five years in prison.

But on an autumn afternoon in Liverpool, something even more extraordinary was about to unfold.

A collision took place between a car and a busy Arriva bus on the popular Huyton to Liverpool bus route.

Onboard CCTV appears to show the bus driving into the back of the vehicle.

The driver and his passengers filed substantial personal injury claims,

which were passed to Arriva's insurance team, but senior investigator Valda Grad

noticed something suspicious.

When I watched the footage back,

there was no reason for the car to have stopped where it did. It just suddenly brakes.

There was no road to the right. Then a recovery truck arrived quickly,

put the vehicle on the pickup truck and drove off, within minutes.

It all looked rather strange.

Sensing the accident might be fake, Valda decided to check whether anyone involved knew each other.

She used social networking sites.

When I looked on Facebook I found that there were matches between the people in the car

and the recovery truck driver.

Sensing a scam, Valda contacted Merseyside Police and fraud specialist Mike Moran investigated.

Reviewing the CCTV, Mike spotted yet more suspicious behaviour, but this time by the bus driver.

I could clearly see him before the journey commenced make a number of calls on a mobile telephone.

Further on, the CCTV cameras clearly showed the car being allowed out by the bus driver for no good reason.

Mike drove on with the investigation and interviewed everyone involved.

He began with the bus driver, but his account didn't match the CCTV.

When I interviewed him, I was concerned as he was almost making out the collision was his fault.

I thought that would be unusual for a professional driver.

Next Mike interviewed pick-up truck driver Anthony Morgan.

He told me that he'd been on a job in the area and had to return an item of property to a customer,

but when I asked them for further details of this, he was unable to provide me with the answers.

Both men also denied knowing each other. Finally, Mike interviewed the driver of the car, Ryan Forman.

He was unable to give any explanation as to why his car crashed into the bus.

I also asked whether or not he knew the other drivers and he denied this.

Unconvinced, Mike applied for permission to check the phone records of the men.

They revealed all three had been in contact prior to the accident.

In the weeks leading up to the crash, all parties had been in communication with one another

-by text messages and phone calls.

-In fact, bus driver Philip Ledham had been in contact with

the driver of the car 28 times that morning. Mike had no doubt it was a fake bus crash,

an audacious plot to make tens of thousands of pounds. All three men were arrested.

I was very surprised that the driver was involved and I was told that our driver rang the pick-up driver.

A judge at Liverpool Crown Court ruled the bus driver had failed in his duty to his passengers

and sentenced him to two years in prison. The other two men were given 18 months.

Simon Mills is the Finance Director of Arriva. Had the fakery been a success,

he estimated it would have cost the company a small fortune.

Had this claim been successful, Arriva would have lost approximately £100,000

in claims and damages.

Arriva are adopting a tough stance on any future bus crash for cash scams.

We will, in conjunction with the police and with the use of CCTV and other analytical means, pursue

the people that are attempting to defraud the business to its ultimate end.

Earlier in the programme, we saw how the Whites arrived in St Tropez

to discover the holiday villa they'd paid £6,000 to stay at didn't exist,

but they weren't alone.

In May, 2009, Christine Shortland and her family paid almost £4,000 for an online ski holiday

in Verbier, Switzerland.

I thought the people were incredibly professional, well laid out emails, very to the point, direct, polite.

I dealt with a chap called Jeremy, who sounded like a well-heeled English chap from London.

One week before they were due to fly, Christine's friend called with bad news.

The website had been shut down.

My friends called to say, "We've been scammed." I just was in absolute shock.

Never did we think that this was anything other than on the up and up.

Christine and her family lost their £4,000 and never heard from Jeremy again.

Way back in 2007,

Jonathan Toop had paid a Christian Bulley 1,500 euros

for his family to stay at the Maison Olive, again advertised online.

We pressed the buzzer and the address was a flat.

And an American lady was staying there. Clearly it was a fraud.

We felt pretty sick, angry.

Two other families had booked into the same fake villa that week. Once again, everyone lost their money.

But all these fake holidays were the work of one fraudster, as one policewoman was about to discover.

Tracey Dixon is a Detective Constable with Sussex Police.

She was assigned a case in which it was initially thought just six families were sold fake holidays.

She was about to discover it was hundreds. In several cases,

the fraudster stupidly used his real name, Carlo Bulley.

Having obtained an order to examine the fraudster's bank account,

it revealed Bulley had duped hundreds of holidaymakers from all over the world.

They came from America, Australia, Africa, Russia, Asia, most European countries.

He had used multiple aliases to sell his fake villas online.

James Meek, Richard Ingall, Richard East-Rigby,

Caspar Bulley, Conrad Bulley, Bull, he used the name Bull, he'd used the name Caroline Bulley.

In the case of Christine Shortland, he had used his girlfriend's bank account, registered as JM Kettunen,

and adopted the name Jeremy Kettunen.

Bulley was making vast sums from his luxury villas,

charging would-be holidaymakers as much as £16,000 for two weeks, but the villas didn't exist

and the victims were left stranded in foreign countries.

Some people had travelled thousands of miles to these destinations.

They had nowhere to stay, they had young families, some were disabled, there were honeymoon couples...

The race was on to find the villa con man.

We felt at that point we were only a week behind him,

but that changed throughout the case. At times it was like months,

then eventually down to weeks, days, then minutes.

As Tracey desperately tried to locate the fraudster,

the banks promised to notify her of payments into his account,

but they failed to do so. Frustrated, she decided to freeze those accounts,

and those of his parents whose accounts he was also using to launder victims' money.

The information came back that he'd been travelling in Kent.

We had footage of him at an ATM taking out the victims' money.

Bulley then visited the Crown Hotel in Woodbridge for a champagne meal with his parents.

CCTV shows him in the bar earlier in the evening. For the first time, he was in Tracey's sights

and he was about to get a nasty surprise.

When they went to pay, Carlo Bulley used his card initially and, of course, it got declined.

Then his parents used their card and it got declined.

The net was closing in on Britain's biggest fake holiday fraudster.

There was a lot of satisfaction at that point to make him realise what it's like

to be stranded and how he had made his victims feel.

The next day, Carlo's father's car was stopped in Essex and his parents arrested,

but Carlo was nowhere to be seen. Tracey raced up to interview them.

It transpires that their son owed them thousands and thousands

and they assumed that he was legitimately letting villas, as he had a business.

With his elderly parents in custody, Carlo Bulley still refused to turn himself in.

But then Tracey and her team had a breakthrough. New victims led them to a new alias, Colin Moore,

and an account in that name. Financial checks revealed a cash card being used in the Cardiff area.

I made a phone call to the card company who them told me he'd literally just used the card

15 minutes previous in a Tesco Express in Mermaid Quay.

We were aware that he'd purchased a fish pie and some broccoli and cigarettes,

so I was really excited at that point because I'd never been that close to him.

Imagine, my heart was racing.

CCTV shows Bulley walking through the town centre with two friends holding the Tesco bag.

Tracey contacted Cardiff CID and they rushed down to Tesco Express.

Comparing the photos we had of him to the footage, they then said it was our man.

Tracey briefed Cardiff CID and staff at the Tesco.

Should Bulley return, they were to call 999. Everyone waited.

Later that evening he did return and luckily the same staff were on duty and they recognised him.

A quick-thinking manager in Tesco Express asked a member of staff to put a coat on

and follow Bulley out of the shop.

And they followed him to a pub in Mermaid Quay.

The police were notified where he was and Carlo Bulley was arrested.

The infamous villa con man had been caught out by a fish pie.

Myself and the financial investigator were ecstatic. We'd worked really hard on this case

and we knew the only way to stop this man from further crimes was to put him away.

Carlo Bulley was jailed for 4½ years.

He pleaded guilty to cheating 116 families out of more than £200,000,

but Tracey believes hundreds more suffered at his hands.

We are aware that there probably were a lot more victims.

And a lot more money that was taken over a longer period of time.

For those who dealt with Bulley, each has their own impression.

It's a perfect international crime.

A very plausible, very charming con man. An old-fashioned con man.

Not only was he taking their money, he was allowing them to travel and then be stranded.

It was almost like one of the worst crimes I've ever dealt with.

Earlier in the programme, we saw the MHRA engage in a series of raids across Britain.

Police!

We saw them join forces with the UK Border Agency to intercept parcels entering Britain.

Quite a lot of counterfeit Viagra.

And we learned the scale of fake medicines bought online in Britain.

About 80% of all drugs bought online from non-registered pharmacists are fake.

All this was part of Operation Pangea, an international week of action across 80 countries

to combat the online sales of counterfeit medicines. The campaign has been a huge success

as Nimo Ahmed, Head of Enforcement at the MHRA, explains.

As far as the UK was concerned, we seized 1.2 million doses worth approximately £2½ million.

And working with the Metropolitan Police we had over 12,5000 websites closed down.

There were 16 raids across the country and some important but worrying seizures.

We had a very successful raid in Brighton. As well as 90,000 doses of unlicensed medicines,

we found a stun gun, a crossbow, we also found knuckledusters, knives,

which just gives you a bit of an idea of the people behind this.

There is huge consumer pressure to buy medicines online.

Research suggests a quarter of all spam emails are trying to promote counterfeit medicine.

However, the experts have some straightforward advice.

Our advice as the MHRA is that people should not buy prescription-only medicines online.

The safest way to buy medicines is by going to visit your doctor.

As soon as you go online, you start taking that risk of buying medicines from websites

which really don't care about what they supply you with.

I would counsel against using any pharmacy on the internet, other than a truly regulated one.

Any pharmacy willing to dispense drugs that are prescription-only without a prescription

is immediately fake.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd