Episode 7 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Get down!

-Get on the floor now!

-Put your hands behind your back now!

In this series I'll be investigating the world of the criminals

who make their money at your expense.

And I'll show you how not to get ripped off.

On today's Fake Britain:

Public markets across the country

that are being flooded by the fakers.

It's a million pounds plus, easily, of counterfeit items.

And the honest traders under threat from the fakers.

The legitimate traders were unable to actually purchase stalls

as they were being taken over

by counterfeit and illegal criminal gangs.

One of the largest fake cigarette factories in the UK - busted.

We're talking 625 million cigarettes a year.

But what's inside the fake cigarettes?

The result of smoking these over a period of time

would be classic signs of heavy metal poisoning.

That would be the Mad Hatter syndrome,

where people exhibit signs of dementia.

And we get ahead of the game by tracking down a pint of beer

that isn't quite what it seems.

It's 40ml short. That to me would be a fake pint.

Got them all here today, come on.

Any four for a pound here.

For centuries, Britain's public markets

have been a thriving feature of our economic landscape.

But now they're under threat from the fakers.

Wembley market is no exception.

With over 200 stalls,

it's billed as the biggest and best market in England.

But it's thought that a number of the stalls here

could be selling fake merchandise.

Simon Legg, from Brent and Harrow Trading Standards,

is having none of it.

Are all teams briefed knowing which stall they're going to, over?

This is one of our removal vans.

In a joint operation, Brent and Harrow Trading Standards and the local police

are heading to Wembley to fight back

against the fakers taking over the market.

It's like a game of cat and mouse, dealing with things at the market.

We're on one side of the market,

they'll be trading illegally on the other side.

Outside, Simon's team of officers are assembled and ready for action.

OK, guys, let's go!

Let's move, come on, everybody.

The officers need to move fast

to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters.

We're trying to get to our target stalls

before people get tipped off we're here

and then they start covering up or hiding their stuff,

alternatively doing a runner from the stalls.

The officers pounce so quickly

that the traders on their first target stall

are only just setting up for the day.

It's all still in its original boxes,

which makes lifting it, bagging and tagging it, moving it away

much easier for us.

And what's inside those boxes is definitely of interest.

That's not a legitimate Ugg boot.

You can just feel the quality of the materials.

It's clear to me this isn't a genuine product.

And there are other big brands on offer - fake big brands, that is.

Again, we've got Nike trainers,

you can tell it's not a genuine Nike product,

just from looking at the quality of it.

Yeah, and the feel of it, and the printing quality inside.

Likewise, over here we've got some Adidas trainers.

Just the feel of the labels,

it's very cheap, poor quality cardboard.

It's got all the telltale signs that they're counterfeit shoes.

For these stall holders,

losing their merchandise to Trading Standards

is merely an operational cost, a mere blip in their huge profits.

To have a stall this size, it's a double pitch stall,

they'll be earning thousands of pounds, depending on how busy it is.

If you're earning £1,000 a day in your average week,

that's £7,000 upwards.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds from counterfeit sales every year

just from this one stall.

All of a sudden, Simon gets wind of some traders who have done a runner.

They're prepared to run off and abandon all their stock.

This is one such stall here.

They've just done a runner and abandoned it.

It's all set up ready to trade, they've put all this stock out,

Adidas, all the major brands are out here, sportswear stuff.

We've got dozens of boxes underneath full of Adidas tracksuits.

This is quite a poor quality item.

It's described as an Adidas Original, couldn't be further from the truth.

The dodgy traders have escaped this time round,

but their stock might not be so lucky.

When the market gets busier later on,

I am sure people walking by will no doubt help themselves, unfortunately.

It's not just fake clothes on offer at Wembley.

Real diamond Shamballa bracelets can cost thousands of pounds.

But as Jon's discovering,

fake diamonds are a counterfeiter's best friend.

Rubbish.

You can just see the finishing.

They're not going to be diamonds at all or any form of crystals,

These probably pop out quite easily,

they probably turn these out in China for 25p, 50p each.

And everyone involved in the sale of this fake jewellery

is making a killing.

Say they retail at £25 a bracelet,

they could probably sell several hundred, 200-300 here easily a day,

and they can make £2,000 just from selling a small portion of it.

And then they're back next week for the same again.

This stall has just been busted.

But the man trading at the stall right next door

doesn't seem to care.

They carried on trading while we were dealing with this stall, stupidly,

so they've been our next target.

What's your business name, please?

That's how blatant people are, they don't have any fear

and are prepared to risk being caught for the benefit of a day's trade.

It's another good haul.

The finishing on that is dreadful.

I don't have to work for Adidas to know that that's counterfeit.

Rather than doing a runner, this trader thinks Trading Standards

might be up for a bit of haggling.

Are you going to take everything as well?

I'll take everything - I can't let you sell this, can I?

How come you're sure it's counterfeit? I'm not sure!

I can tell you this is counterfeit straight away,

just the finishing on that.

The stall holder is baffled as to why Trading Standards

would stop him from selling his goods.

He thinks he's doing a public service,

but his argument's falling on deaf ears.

It's up to the trader to make sure he's not selling counterfeit goods.

So if he's kept his receipts then he's got some comeback,

if he's paid cash for the stuff then he's struggling.

Come on be fair, be fair.

Fake clothing might seem like a cheap bargain.

But it can also be dangerous.

Cheap hood chords on fake tops like this don't meet EU legislation.

They're unsafe, and could lead to disaster.

Child's got that done up around its neck,

I don't know, it's in the playground, it's coming down the stairs.

You know, it's an extreme example but it could happen.

And that's why the safety legislation is there.

Fake brands and clear safety issues. Trading Standards have seen enough.

-Effectively...

-Your powers are limitless and my rights are no rights.

No, that's not true. You do have rights.

What's going to happen is we're going to seize all this obviously.

Overall, it's a massive haul of fake gear from several market stalls.

Enough to fill up not one, not two, but five transit vans.

The counterfeit haul is taken to a secret storage depot

somewhere in London.

It will be kept safely locked up pending the criminal investigation.

And yet again,

it's all hands on deck due to the sheer volume of the seized load.

Trolley after trolley, it keeps coming.

I reckon between the vehicles today

we had at least five tonnes worth of evidence.

It's a million pounds plus, easily, of counterfeit items.

The profits of these guys are enormous.

The likes of myself grafting away for a fair salary

where they're raking it in. Thousands of pounds worth a day,

the market traders can easily make in profit from these counterfeit items.

It's all in a day's work for Brent and Harrow Trading Standards.

This is satisfying, having these seized goods

brought back with us today.

It's counterfeit goods taken off the marketplace.

People aren't going to be profiteering from it,

consumers aren't going to be harmed or misled by it.

So a good haul for us, really pleased.

Coming up, we're out with Greater Manchester Police

as they crack down on the criminal counterfeiters.

We're heading to one of six addresses

where we suspect there will be significant amounts of counterfeit products.

We're known as a nation of animal lovers.

26 million of us own pets,

and we spend around £14 billion a year caring for them.

But the fakers are learning that when it comes to pet insurance,

big value pets can mean big payouts.

And fake claims on pet insurance policies

are now the fastest growing area of insurance fraud.

Claire Laver is a specialist insurance lawyer

who's been investigating the ever-growing number

of pet-related claims.

Pet fraud has started to increase.

The statistics suggest that in 2009,

around about £420,000 of detected claims fraud was identified.

And that increased to 1.9 million in 2010.

So that represents a 450% increase overall.

Claire knows of one case where a dog breeder went to gruesome lengths

to cash in on her pet insurance policies

by repeatedly faking the dates of the deaths of her puppies.

The case of Jill Allen is particularly macabre

because she was a dog breeder

who would posthumously insure her puppies

and then present claims for the loss of those puppies.

Rather than insuring her pedigree puppies against death while they were still alive,

the dog breeder insured them after they had died.

Having already died, she would place the puppies in cling film,

mark them with a date and place them in her freezer.

She would then put in her fake claim saying the puppy had just died,

when in fact it had been lying preserved in her freezer.

She would then defrost them as and when was necessary

to substantiate the claims presented against the insurance company.

When the woman's home was finally searched,

nine frozen puppies were found,

each of which was ready to be thawed out

to prove it had died when she said it had.

But Claire believes that some of the fakers trying to cash in on pet insurance policies

never even owned animals in the first place.

The types of fraud that are committed

generally involve fictitious animals and not real animals.

And in order to make the claim successful,

people will forge documents to support their claims.

They will redirect calls through to themselves,

they will insure fictitious animals.

DCI Dave Wood knows all about the lengths

to which some of the pet insurance fakers will go.

He heads up the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department,

a specialist unit set up by City of London Police

to combat insurance fraud.

Dave has dealt with many a fake pet insurance claim in his time.

But he'll always remember his first ever case.

My unit investigated an interesting case involving a young lady

who was out in a park walking her two pedigree Chihuahua dogs.

She was approached by two youths,

who, during the course of this encounter,

eventually made off with her two Chihuahuas against her wishes.

Pedigree Chihuahuas can cost thousands of pounds.

The dog's owner did what any other owner of a pedigree pooch would do

if their pride and joy went missing.

The dogs were valued to the tune of £1,500 each.

She reported this theft and also made an insurance claim to her company

for the loss of those two pet Chihuahuas.

But the woman owner

wasn't just claiming for the cost of the Chihuahuas.

In addition to that, the lady also claimed £2,600 worth of printing costs

for some laminated posters, which she allegedly put up in the local area

in her effort to trace these two dogs.

In total, the dogs' owner submitted a claim for around £6,000

for the Chihuahuas, named Jet and Gizmo,

giving the insurance company photographs of the dogs

and receipts for their purchase.

But something about her story didn't quite add up,

and her insurance company got in touch with DCI Dave Wood,

who investigated further.

He took a closer look at the receipts

and didn't like what he saw.

The receipts that were produced by the offender

were on what I would describe as scraps of paper.

I'd be expecting for high value pedigree animals worth £1,500 each,

they'd be acquired from a breeder,

and that breeder would have official invoice

or some sort of headed notepaper.

Dave then discovered something rather odd

about the photos of the Chihuahuas.

In fact, the photograph that she put forward to the insurance company

as being the image of Jet, in fact turned out to be obtained

from an American Chihuahua Appreciation Society website.

But it wasn't just the photographs that were fake.

Our enquiries revealed that these posters were never in fact printed,

she never in fact paid for them

and she therefore never put them up anywhere.

So the whole thing was fake.

In fact, the only place where Jet and Gizmo existed

were in the vivid imagination of their so-called owner.

This was a fake claim. It was totally fraudulent,

and the two dogs were never in her possession or even existed.

The wannabe Chihuahua-owner eventually admitted

her claim was dishonest and fraudulent.

She was officially cautioned by the police.

For Dave Wood, the case of the fake Chihuahuas, and others like it,

have serious implications for honest animal lovers everywhere.

Up to £50 of that pet owner annual policy

is on as a direct result of insurance fraud.

And our unit has been set up to target people

who are hitting the industry in this way.

And over time, we are hoping to make a significant impact

and reduce people's premiums.

This is Felixstowe Port - Britain's biggest container port.

Over 40% of everything that is shipped into the country comes through here.

That's around three and a half million containers

arriving at the port each year.

And when it comes to spotting the ones which contain fake goods,

the UK Border Agency have their work cut out.

So, they use mobile X-Ray scanners. Both large, and small.

This morning they've identified a consignment of ten suspect crates that have come in from China.

The crates have been listed as containing kitchen utensils.

But Andy Darke is using one of the smaller X-Ray scanners

to take a closer look at what's inside one them.

And although it's meant to be pots and pans,

the machine's showing there's something organic inside.

There's only one way to find out for sure what the organic material is.

Time for the good, old-fashioned crowbar.

And as we can hear from the way they're rattling,

we expect this to be the kitchen equipment.

There we are!

The crate does indeed contain cooking utensils,

but not ones you'd want to use with your Sunday roast.

If you try to pick anything up with it - oh dear.

Couldn't even pick up a Brussels sprout with it.

In fact, this dodgy kitchenware is what's called a cover-load.

Items packed into the top of a container for the sole purpose

of concealing an illicit load.

In this case, cigarettes.

And to the untrained eye, ordinary cigarettes destined for British retailers.

These look very good.

They've even got the tear-off strip that says "part of a multi-pack".

There's a UK barcode on there.

People would be buying these and paying the normal UK price for them,

believing them to be the real thing.

But for the experienced eyes of the UK Border Agency,

there is a tell-tale sign that these are in fact fake cigarettes.

These are undoubtedly counterfeit cigarettes,

because why would somebody be importing British-made cigarettes

with "UK duty paid" on them into England from China?

The numbers of fake cigarettes found under their counterfeit cover-load are starting to add up.

Three boxes in there and there's 8,000 in each box.

160,000.

So ten boxes make it 1.6 million.

The revenue involved is well over a quarter of a million pounds,

so the consignment itself, the retail value in the shops,

is probably in the region of half a million pounds.

The counterfeiters know that some of their crates

might be intercepted by hawk-eyed officials.

So they're always looking for ingenious ways to smuggle

their fake fags into Blighty.

The cover loads we've found recently can vary from anything from shoes,

tissues, kitchen utensils.

They always try to find ways around it and it's up to us to try

and catch them out, and find what they're doing.

But the fakers will need to up their game if they want to get

their gear past Felixstowe's inquisitive gatekeepers.

All they've done probably is assuming we might go in through the top,

open one of them and think, "Ah, it's all right, it's kitchen stuff",

"We'll leave the rest of it."

But we're not like that. We'll have a proper look.

And have a proper look they do.

At anything suspicious that comes into the port.

And Andrew Rose has come across an entire shipping container,

again from China, with a rather playful cover-load.

Cheap toys.

The box isn't even full, is it.

It's only half full.

But the fakers can't buy Andrew off with a car.

He wants to see what lies beneath the fake cover-load of this container.

We're about six foot from the end of the container now

and we've actually reached where the actual cigarettes are.

The cigarettes come from China,

but mysteriously, the tax labels on them are Dutch.

It's for sale in the UK,

but maybe having a Dutch appearance gives it an air of respectability,

if you like, so anyone selling it would suggest to the customer

that it's been brought from Holland, so they're genuine.

Andrew can smell a fake cigarette a mile off.

Counterfeit cigarettes do have more of a chemically smell to them,

which these do actually,

so again that leads us to suspect that they're probably counterfeit.

And there are other tell-tale signs that these are fake fags.

This particular one, the packaging has got a little bit of a red stripe

going through one of the actual individual packets.

This one's got a tax stamp missing.

This one, one of the cartons has got the labelling the wrong way round,

so it's attention to detail which tends to suggest that

they're not the genuine thing.

In total, the UK Border Agency officers find 400,000 fake cigarettes

in the back of the container.

And in this warehouse, there are millions of fake cigarettes

that have been seized over the past 12 months.

Every year, British ports seize tens of millions of fake cigarettes,

originating mainly from China.

Later on, we see how fake cigarettes

aren't just being imported into Britain.

They're even being produced in phenomenal numbers

in our own back yard.

And, the unexpected dangers that lurk inside.

We've found high levels of lead,

which is a central nervous system poison.

Earlier, we saw how London's Wembley Market is rife with

counterfeit clothing, shoes, and jewellery.

But the problem of fake market merchandise reaches far beyond London,

and goes beyond fake clothing.

Fake CDs and DVDs on a market stall.

Not perhaps an unusual sight, but while it might look like

a small-scale crime,

it's actually the public face of an illegal trade

now worth an estimated £100 million a year in the UK.

Attempting to disrupt that trade are the Greater Manchester Police.

As night falls, they're taking part in an operation,

led by Suzie Winter from the Alliance Against Intellectual Property Theft.

We're heading to one of six addresses across the Greater Manchester Salford area,

where we suspect there will be significant amounts of counterfeit products

that service three main markets in the Greater Manchester and Salford area

that are hotbeds for the sale of counterfeit goods.

All of a sudden, the team are given the green light to go in.

We're can just see the police van's just pulled up ahead of us.

As the search gets under way inside the house,

some younger members of the neighbourhood bob up

to see what's going on.

BLEEP from Ashton!

Damian!

Sorry.

You stay over here!

Oi!

ARGUING CONTINUES

Inside the house, the officers are amazed by what they've found.

Just at this one property tonight, is about 500 discs,

probably a value of product on those discs of about £8-£10,000.

It's going to be enough to run a market stall.

They found two DVD burners,

blank discs ready to be put into the burner,

they found plastic casing,

so all the things you would need to run a piracy operation.

Behind the walls of this suburban house, there is a DVD factory.

And the officers caught the man faking the discs red-handed!

The burner was even switched on and was in operation

as the police went into the property.

The gentlemen that the police were looking for was at home

and has been arrested and taken to the police station.

For the team, it's a great result,

and one that's helped to protect British businesses.

Traders are going out of business because they can't compete with

the prices that these criminals pay, charge for their product.

Industry loses money, jobs are lost.

And there are links to other criminal activity.

Detective Inspector Caroline Walker from Greater Manchester Police

knows all too well the huge impact that counterfeiting has had

on honest traders at Manchester's outdoor Salford Market.

The market here at Salford used to have a number of stalls

but gradually over the years, we've seen a steady increase

in the amount of stalls selling counterfeit items

taking over the market themselves,

selling vast quantities of these goods.

The legitimate traders are being pushed away from these stalls

and were unable to actually purchase stalls on a weekend

as they were being taken over

by the counterfeit and illegal criminal gang.

After repeated attempts to combat

the criminal counterfeiters taking over the market,

it was shut down

and the legitimate traders offered a place in the indoor market,

free from unfair competition from the fakers.

Criminal gangs attempt to smuggle

hundreds of millions of fake cigarettes into the country each year

through our major sea ports.

They'll use everything from kitchen utensils to toy cars

to cover up their antics.

But shockingly, some crime gangs are producing fake cigarettes

right here in Britain

and even setting up fake cigarette factories right under our noses.

Lee Fletcher found this out the hard way.

He helps to run a successful family business, Tapton Business Park.

Lee's family had rented out one of their industrial units

to business partners Phillip Hall and Philip Robinson.

Nothing was ever flagged up in our eyes to question them, you know.

They just seemed like normal guys,

there was nothing questionable about them.

Rent were paid on time, not a problem.

But Hall and Robinson were anything but your average guys next door.

And one morning, out of the blue,

Lee got the phone call that he'll remember for the rest of his life.

We've got two of our own companies down here

and we got a call from one of the management team,

saying how, unfortunately, work had been stopped

due to the seizure of this big cigarette factory.

It just stopped work, nothing going on, that's it.

Lee was horrified to learn that his tenants were in fact criminals

who were plotting to set up a huge fake cigarette factory

behind the closed shutters of their rented industrial unit.

Robinson headed up the UK operation

and Hall was the main supplier of tobacco.

But the criminals would never get the chance

to put their ambitious plan into action.

What they didn't realise

was that Gary Lampon and his team at HM Revenue and Customs

had had them under surveillance for some time.

And finally, they had enough evidence

to swoop on Unit 8 at the business park.

The officers were astounded at what they found.

When officers entered the premises,

they were really quite surprised by the scale.

There were a large number of machines.

They ranged from the cigarette-making machines

through the packaging and actually the cellophane machines as well

that were used to wrap and pack the packets of 20.

Alongside those machines

were a huge number of flat-packed cigarettes cartons.

It was an extremely professional set-up.

The tobacco manufacturing plant was so sophisticated,

the gang flew in expert technicians from overseas

to put it together and operate it.

This was a fake cigarette factory

capable of operating on an industrial scale.

We're talking potentially upwards of 625 million cigarettes a year.

It's running along the same kind of scale

as an actual international cigarette manufacturing firm

like Imperial Tobacco or Gallaher Brothers.

They used machinery which had the capacity

to turn out thousands and thousands and thousands of cigarettes per hour.

But rather than targeting mainstream manufacturers,

Hall and Robinson planned to breathe new life into an old Russian brand.

The manufacturing facility was aiming to produce fake Idigoff cigarettes.

Idigoff are a Russian brand which is no longer in production.

It's all about duping the public

into believing they're buying a legitimate product

that was smuggled from overseas.

With the machinery churning out fake cigarettes day and night,

the gang would have to go to extraordinary lengths

to conceal their activities and keep below the radar.

You can see on the wall here the soundproofing that had been put in

because the machinery itself was extremely noisy.

The other people here would have had no idea what was going on.

Once those shutters go down, it's sound-proofed

and anything could be going on behind the doors.

The fakers were so eager to make a killing with their cigarettes

that they had tobacco-manufacturing equipment set up

and ready to go in other industrial units in Nottinghamshire.

Investigators found cigarette-manufacturing equipment

capable of producing up to 750 million cigarettes a year

and in a nearby barn,

100,000 fake Golden Virginia pouches.

Gary and his team had stopped

one of the largest ever cigarette factories found in the UK.

Certainly in terms of scale,

this factory was one of the largest seen in the country.

The revenue lost on cigarette smuggling

is around £2 billion a year, we estimate.

If this cigarette factory had been up and running

and manufacturing at full capacity,

we've a potential of losing a further £131 million a year.

It's a very substantial sum

and underlines the scale of the operation.

Philip Robinson was sentenced

to seven years and four months in prison.

His partner in crime, Phillip Hall, was already serving five years

for offences relating to fake cigarettes

and he was given 18 months on top of that.

It was a great result for Gary and his team

but the experience has had a lasting impact

on the owners of this business park.

We had a downturn in business, obviously,

while the investigation was going on.

They kind of shut the site - that's it, it's all systems stop.

It put us in a position where we were losing £15,000 per day.

It's a lot of money to lose, especially for a family-run company.

From now on, they're going to be a lot more wary

about prospective tenants who knock on their door.

Since it's happened, we vet our tenants a lot more.

I can only advise on other landlords to do the same.

Coming up, we find out what's inside the fake cigarettes

that are flooding into the country.

They may contain certain substances

which are toxic or dangerous to health.

There's nothing us Brits love more

than relaxing over a cool pint of beer -

so much so that we buy nearly two million pints a day.

But when is a pint not a pint?

Well, when it's got a large head of froth on it.

Well, here we have an example

of a rather badly-poured pint with a huge head.

That's probably about 20% short.

You're probably losing 50 or 60 pence on that pint.

Iain Loe from the Campaign for Real Ale

thinks he's onto an invisible crime

that could be happening in a pub near you.

People are buying what they think is a pint

but what they are receiving is far less than a pint.

It's 95-90% of a pint. They are fake pints.

Industry guidelines recommend

that a pint can be 95% liquid

and the rest of it can be head, or froth.

But some pubs are serving their pints

with more froth and less liquid

and that's called a short measure.

A fake small pint might not seem like a big deal

but Iain has a head for figures

and he thinks this could be a huge crime going unnoticed.

A short measure may be just small beer to some people

but adding up all those bits of small beer

comes out to a lot of beer in the end

and we calculate it's probably £1.3 million a day

that's being lost by the consumer

by beer being served that is too short.

That's £440 million a year.

I think there are a lot of British beer drinkers, pub goers, who don't realise they're being rooked.

Their pockets are being picked, as it were, without their knowledge.

But luckily for beer lovers, Trading Standards are on the case of this invisible crime.

And not just any Trading Standards team.

The Weights and Measures team.

Ash Shah is a man who takes his quantities seriously.

Almost £2 billion worth of trade every day is carried out where goods are measured,

by some way, shape or form.

Even slight differences in what you're getting, as opposed to what you've paid for,

can mean huge, huge profits for those unscrupulous traders.

More specifically, unscrupulous pubs that might be short-changing their customers

by serving pints that are less than pints.

We followed Ash and his Weights and Measures team

on an evening operation to weed out the pint fakers.

We're off to a pub.

We're going to having a look to see whether they're dispensing a correct pint as opposed to a fake pint,

making sure that consumers are getting the amount of liquid they're paying for.

And woe betide any publican found to be under-filling their pints.

If we find that any of those is below what we expect to get in terms of the tolerances which are allowed,

then we'll take some appropriate action.

Whether that be seizing the equipment, having a word with the publican,

maybe with a view to taking a prosecution or not.

In the first pub, the team quickly get to work by posing as evening drinkers.

We bought a pint of Fosters, we bought a pint of Carlsberg.

That looks to be absolutely fine at the moment.

But is there too much head on this pint?

A simple test can tell Ash and the team.

First, an anti-foaming agent is dripped into a specially-calibrated flask to turn the whole pint,

including the head, into liquid.

The flask will tell Ash exactly how much beer is in this glass.

The results are in.

The line for the perfect pint is there.

Basically, we are only about 7, maybe 8mls short of a pint.

That's nearly 99% of a pint. Well within the guidelines.

That was, yeah, a fairly healthy pint there.

If I was served one of these pints I'd be quite happy.

Time for the next pub. Once again the team pose as customers.

So we've got a pint of Stella and a pint of Fosters.

And it's not looking good.

Both of those look to have fairly substantial heads on them,

so, I think when we have a look to see exactly what they contain,

we'll have a better idea of exactly how much fluid is contained within that.

The team carry out the same tests on the beer and the results are pretty conclusive.

-This little red line here should be what the pint should be.

-Yes.

And what we've got is this much.

It's actually gone off the scale here.

The pint is 40ml short.

With a bit of number crunching, it's clear that you might want to look elsewhere for your evening drink.

What we've actually got here, is we've actually got a pint which we've paid £2.90 for.

In reality, we should have paid £2.69 for that same pint.

That, to me, would be a fake pint.

I'm not getting the full pint of beer that I've actually paid for.

This pub's pulling 21 pence less than a full pint.

So, Ash isn't going to pull any punches when it comes to giving the manager some friendly advice.

You're trained to dispense this so you must make sure that the consumer gets what they've paid for.

Yeah?

If you were to go into a petrol station, yeah? And you put in £20 worth of petrol but only got £19 out,

you wouldn't like that. You wouldn't be happy. Yeah?

And it might not be the way the pints are being pulled.

It could even be down to the glasses having the wrong markings.

We're going to seize these two glasses.

Ash and the Weights and Measures team will investigate this bar further

to find out what caused the short pint and they'll analyse the glasses the pints are served in.

For Ash, it's a victory for protecting your rights as a consumer

so that you know you're getting what you're paying for.

Under the circumstances that we've just seen,

if that was replicated in all the pubs right throughout the country for every pint sold,

that would mean £159 million extra that consumers are paying for. It's absolutely staggering.

Back in his local cosy pub that sells real pints,

Iain and the Campaign For Real Ale are taking a glass half full approach to the problem.

They say you don't have to settle for a pint you're not quite happy with!

Consumers should rebel and ask for their pints to be topped up and get genuine pints

and not be content with fake pints.

We've seen how the fakers are trying to smuggle counterfeit cigarettes into Britain

and spoken to the victims of the fake cigarette factories being built right here in the UK.

And while we all know that smoking real cigarettes is bad for you,

smoking fake cigarettes could be even worse.

These fake cigarettes were seized in a series of raids by Blackpool Trading Standards.

We had them tested at Lancashire Scientific Services.

Andrew Smith will check to see if there's anything unusual, or even harmful, inside them.

They may contain certain substances which are toxic

or dangerous to health.

This looks like a simple test, but after years of experience scrutinising fake cigarettes,

Andrew can see the wood for the trees.

There are some fairly serious chunks of what appears to be wood in this one.

You wouldn't find chunks of wood in legitimately-produced cigarettes.

They appear to be cigarettes made of tobacco contaminated with floor sweepings.

The presence of pieces of wood are obviously not normal in cigarettes.

There's evidence that it is a counterfeit product.

Smoking floor sweepings is bad enough, but research shows that inhaling wood smoke

can be as harmful as breathing in fumes from a car exhaust.

Fake cigarettes have been found to contain animal hairs and even droppings.

But the human eye can only see so much.

With access to state-of-the-art equipment, Andrew has, in the past, analysed fake cigarettes

which contained substances a lot more harmful than that.

Time for some heavy metal.

This is the equipment we use to measure the amount of heavy metals in the samples.

It measures, lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.

In recent samples of counterfeit tobacco,

we found high levels of lead,

which is a central nervous system poison.

Lead is also a long-term cumulative poison.

And the levels we've found are very much higher than we would find in normal cigarettes.

A steady build up of heavy metals could play havoc with your health.

The result of smoking these over a period of time would be that the heavy metals accumulate in the body

resulting in the classic signs of heavy metal poisoning, which is a central nervous system poison.

Classically, for mercury, that would be the Mad Hatter syndrome where people exhibit signs of dementia.

Fake cigarettes have been found to contain 75% more tar, 28% more nicotine

and 63% more carbon monoxide than you'd find in real ones.

That's double the amount of cancer-causing agents.

After they've been seized and tested, they need to be destroyed

so there's no chance of them falling in to the wrong hands.

And HM Revenue and Customs have come up with an ingenious and environmentally-friendly way

to turn something fake into something functional.

The cigarettes are taken to a secret facility

where they're shredded and then pulped.

With the final product being taken to power stations

where it is used to generate electricity for the National Grid.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd