Episode 9 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 the 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 shop assistant who came face-to-face with a fake firefighter.

He just took it from his pocket and just pointed at me.

Corner shops selling fake booze that could kill.

As you can see, we have a peak for chloroform.

It could potentially cause cancer.

Here on Fake Britain, we're no stranger to the production and distribution of fake booze.

But as more of us buy our evening tipple from our local stores, the fakers are cashing in.

In a racket worth a billion pounds a year, fake booze is being sold

up and down the country - and it's coming to a corner shop near you.

Here's a sobering statistic - Staffordshire Trading Standards

say one in five corner shops in the county is selling fake alcohol.

But Darren Mountford and Mark Wilson from Staffordshire Trading Standards

are having none of it.

They're on a mission to crack down on the fake booze being sold on your doorstep.

Many illicit alcohol products are produced on an industrial scale

at distilleries in warehouses, etc,

And just basically distributed through local retailers,

potentially through white vans and the like.

Today, they're hitting a number of local corner shops

which have previously sold fake alcohol.

My name's Mark Wilson, Staffordshire County Council Trading Standards.

We're here for a routine inspection of your alcoholic products.

Darren and Mark quickly get to work

examining the shop's stock of alcohol.

With thousands of fake booze bottles potentially on display in corner shops like this,

they need to be spotted and seized as quickly as possible.

Luckily for Mark and Darren, they have some new technology at their fingertips.

This ultraviolet light immediately spots fakes.

Under the lamp, a legitimate UK duty stamp should fluoresce,

or glow green or yellow.

A fake sticker won't do anything at all.

It's not long before the gadget detects a suspect bottle of vodka.

This duty paid marker is not fluorescing

when we expose it to a UV lamp.

But that's not the only thing that's raised Darren's suspicions.

You can see by the label here, it's not squared, it's off kilter.

You can also see here by the state of the label,

it's bubbled on the front, it's not been put on with any great care, as you would expect.

It's torn here, and it's those indicators which have given us

reasonable cause to believe that this product is illicit.

Trading Standards are concerned that fake vodka could contain

high levels of methanol an ingredient used to make anti-freeze,

and harmful to humans if ingested in large quantities.

If it contained methanol, it would be unfit for human consumption.

Members of the public wouldn't be aware of any of the issues around this product.

And where this product exists, it needs taking out of the supply chain.

Darren and Mark find a suspiciously understated bottle of vodka,

which is also cause for concern.

They won't be needing the UV scanner for this one.

This bottle we've picked up here contains no duty stamp.

And also, there's no details on the back of it

concerning who makes it, so we'll seize this today.

For Darren and Mark, it's enough to confiscate the suspect stock.

It's a good start to the day, but there's no time to hang around.

There's an epidemic of fake booze sweeping across the county,

and Darren and Mark have had a busy month so far.

We've seized in excess of 1,200 bottles of spirit,

and I think we're looking at currently having inspected

round about 350, 370 premises.

If 20% of the shops in the area could be selling fake booze,

Darren and Mark have their work cut out checking as many premises as they can.

The officers head off to yet another shop.

We're just here today to conduct a routine inspection

to check some of your alcohol products.

They begin a thorough search of all the bottles of alcohol stored in the shop.

Everything seems fine, until Mark spots something out of the ordinary.

This particular product is known as Drops Vodka.

It's one we have intelligence about as being a illicit production.

Real vodka is made by the distillation of fermented grains or potatoes.

But although this bottle looks like vodka,

and the label says it's vodka, Mark knows it's not vodka.

The liquid isn't distilled and it contains industrial solvents and methanol.

During the distillation process, it won't go through the normal quality control procedures

so chemicals and traces will be left in there which would normally be taken out of a genuine brand.

Drops Vodka is actually a known fake brand of vodka set up by the bootleggers themselves.

You wouldn't want to be doing shots of this on a night out.

As you can see, when I tip the bottle upside down,

there's floating particles and debris.

It's indicative of poor manufacturing processes.

It's one that we suspect of containing high levels of methanol

and there's obviously a public safety, public health aspect to that.

The fake vodka could contain chemicals harmful to human health.

It's a serious enough discovery for Mark and Darren to confiscate the fake vodka.

The bottles are bagged, tagged, and taken away for further analysis.

It's been a good day's work so far, with several bottles

of the suspect alcohol from different shops now off the shelves.

But suddenly, a call comes in from another trading standards team.

They've also been out on the hunt for fake alcohol.

They've been searching a shop - a big shop - and they need a helping hand.

There's a lot here. We're certainly going to take a fair bit of product away.

The team are finding counterfeit alcohol left, right and centre.

So it's all hands on deck and ultraviolet lights are out in force.

They've found some suspect bottles of Smirnoff vodka -

a widely-recognised brand which has fallen victim to the fakers.

It's very poor quality labels on these products, no fluorescence,

so that would lead to me to believe it's a counterfeit product.

Prince Consort is a genuine brand of vodka, but worryingly,

fake versions like this of it have been known to carry potential health risks.

We've had previous seizures in Staffordshire in the last couple of weeks.

This is a product we are already aware of,

and have confirmed intelligence to suggest it contains high levels of methanol.

This product needs to come off sale today.

Overall, it's a great haul for the team,

and a lot of fake booze off the shelves.

It's probably one of the bigger finds that we've found.

Interestingly enough, it's varying brands. It's a good hit so far, yes.

In total, the team have seized 81 suspect bottles of alcohol from this shop alone.

Of particular concern are the Drops Vodka and the fake Prince Consort Vodka,

which could contain high levels of methanol or other dangerous chemicals.

Later, we find out exactly what is inside these seized bottles of alcohol

that you might have bought and drunk!

Most of us think of a person in uniform as someone we can instinctively trust.

Someone we can call on for help in an emergency,

or someone who'll call on us to make sure that we're OK.

Whether it's a police officer or a firefighter, people in uniform are there to make us feel protected.

But what if the firefighter you thought was there to help you

was actually a fake firefighter who wanted to rob you?

Bagavathur Kalainathan, known as "Kalai" to his friends,

left the political violence of his home country, Sri Lanka,

to build what he thought would be a safe and happy life in Britain.

I wanted to just get away from all the troubles and I want to live nice and peacefully.

That's why I came to this country.

Kalai began his new life in Dagenham in Essex,

where he found himself a steady job

and quickly settled into his daily routine as a shop assistant in a convenience store.

But that daily routine was about to be turned upside down.

I was standing by the main till and I was just calculating the money

to close the shift and everything.

Unexpectedly, a firefighter then arrived, saying he was there to check the alarms in the store.

I was standing in that position over there and this guy walks in through the door

and says, "I want to check the fire alarm."

He then asked for the sensors to be checked.

It's not uncommon for a shop's fire alarms to be checked out

by someone who knows what they're doing.

Today, for Kalai, that trusted person was someone he thought was a firefighter,

so he thought nothing of showing him round the shop.

I just showed him all the sensors, I just took him all over.

Kalai showed the firefighter all of the sensors on the ceilings around the whole shop.

So far, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

But finally, the firefighter asked to be shown the office at the back of the store.

So we just came in,

into the office,

and he was standing like this, and he just closed the door.

Kalai will remember what happened next for the rest of his life.

He just took it from his pocket and just pointed at me.

Despite convincing appearances,

this firefighter was in fact a fake firefighter,

an armed robber in an elaborate disguise, looking for money.

Yeah, I was scared when he pointed at me. He said, "Open the safe, mate."

And I said, "We don't have a safe."

And he just kept pointing at me and asked me to get the money

and I said, "I don't have any, the boss just took it."

But I lied.

But Kalai's attempts to throw the thief off the scent

of the shop's hard-earned money weren't enough.

Then he was just looking through the tables and other stuff.

And he found it.

The fake firefighter had found what he had come looking for.

He got away with £2,000, or two bundles of £1,000,

which I kept after counting, ready for the end of the day.

So he just got hold of it and went.

And he was prepared to go to chilling lengths to make a clean getaway with the stolen cash.

He put me in the chair

and he said, "Don't move. If you move, I will shoot you. I will shoot your friend."

So I am more worried about him than myself, actually!

Outside on the shop floor,

Kalai's friend was oblivious to the drama unfolding inside the office just yards away.

Despite Kalai's best attempts

to send him a coded warning in his native Tamil language.

I tried to say "Kallar." Kallar means thief.

But he didn't understand that.

But the funny thing is, he thought someone else is in the shop,

and he was looking for them, not for the fireman!

HE LAUGHS

Luckily for Kalai and the rest of the shop staff,

the fake firefighter then turned his attention to getting away with the £2,000 he'd just stolen.

It was then that Kalai realised that this fake firefighter wasn't operating alone.

He had backup.

There was a guy on the door,

and the car was waiting outside to just get away.

So they know what they are doing, they are well prepared and they are well organised.

Everything in position. Then I said, "OK, they are a perfect team."

They were indeed the perfect team of fake firefighters.

And despite being brave enough to try to run after them,

Kalai and his friend just weren't quick enough.

We just went out to try to get the number of the car,

but it's so fast, we didn't get it.

Later, we find out how far the fake firefighters' colossal crime spree went.

There were seven members. They stole in the region of £200,000.

And how it came to a crashing halt.

Fake alcohol is being sold in shops across Staffordshire

and Trading Standards officers there are taking as much of it

off the shelves as they can.

They've seized bottles of Drops vodka, a fake vodka brand,

containing strange black particles.

And they've also found fake Prince Consort vodka.

Darren Mountford needs to know

if there are any dangerous chemicals in the liquid in these bottles.

So he's brought them back to Staffordshire Scientific Services

for Jonathan Lovatt to run some tests.

A lot of fake vodkas have high levels of methanol.

Methanol, if consumed in high enough doses, can lead to

problems with the liver or kidneys and it can also lead to blindness

and if you drink it in significant amounts, it can even lead to death.

First, Jonathan takes a closer look at the strange dark particles

that Trading Standards discovered in the Drops vodka.

Those black bits are probably dust from wherever,

if it's been manufactured it tends to be in an old building,

if it's a fake product, and you often get dust and debris from the ceiling

or wherever it's been manufactured, that's contaminating the product.

These particles wouldn't be present in legitimately-produced vodka.

We obviously don't normally expect to see any matter in a bottled vodka.

I wouldn't be happy drinking it.

We'll see what other chemicals it contains.

Jonathan runs a sample of the Drops vodka through a test

to see if it contains any methanol.

The results come in and there is some potentially-harmful methanol

in this bottle.

But it could contain something much worse.

It doesn't have high levels of methanol,

but we suspect it might contain trace amounts of chloroform.

Jonathan runs the Drops vodka through a second test,

this time for chloroform, a hazardous compound

which should never be present in any food or drink.

The results are in

and there is something terrible lurking in this bottle.

As you can see, we have a peak for chloroform,

Chloroform is a carcinogenic compound

and potentially, even at trace levels,

potentially it could cause cancer,

which is why it shouldn't be in these products at any level.

It's a good job that this bottle of fake vodka

is now off the shelves and can't do anybody any harm.

But the tests aren't over yet.

Next up, it's the fake Prince Consort

and Jonathan runs the methanol test again.

He's concerned by the results.

This is the spectrum as it's coming off in real-time,

and what we can see here is quite a large peak for methanol.

It's probably at least ten times higher than you'd normally expect,

maybe even more than that.

The results are passed on to Frank Hollywood,

who heads up Staffordshire Scientific Services

and after further analysis,

he thinks the results are even worse than that.

In the Consort, the methanol level will be 20 times the legal limit,

so this is very high.

If you bought this fake vodka, you could find yourself

drinking ingredients more commonly found in antifreeze.

They're using industrial product to create a cheaper product

and so they're selling this to make more profit.

But the problem is, it is toxic and it will produce ill health.

Drinking this vodka could prove fatal.

If somebody consumed some of this spirit on a night out,

the next day they would be unwell, they'd suffer sickness

and over a longer period,

it could eventually cause blindness and death.

Earlier, we saw how Kalai had been the victim of a brutal armed robbery,

carried out by a fake firefighter

pretending to check the shop's fire alarms.

The man behind the uniform was Gary Griffiths,

an ex-Metropolitan police officer.

Griffiths was part of a criminal gang led by Darren Lloyd,

the lookout on the door wearing the bandana in Kalai's shop.

The gang of armed robbers were on a crime spree

that would net them thousands.

But unbeknownst to the gang,

they were under surveillance by Detective Chief Inspector Ian Corner

and the Metropolitan Police's Flying Squad.

This particular gang were individuals who were experienced criminals,

knew how to commit armed robberies,

were well-versed in how they were going to do it

and the subterfuge just, I suppose, showed the cunning nature of them

and how motivated they were in order to commit the offences.

The armed robbers knew that by posing as real firefighters,

they would be tapping into the innate sense of trust

that people have in an official uniform.

And having already robbed security vehicles across the Dagenham area,

the violent armed gang were now graduating to high street shops.

DCI Corner went back to the gang's very first target.

We're going to the Co-Op in Fencepiece Road in Barkingside,

which was the scene of one of the robberies.

On a busy high street, the gang were about to strike.

Two of the gang, dressed as fake firefighters,

gained access to the premises by telling members of staff

that the fire alarm had been sounding and they thought there was a fault

with the system, they needed to inspect the panels.

Once they'd gained access to the area where the cash was held,

they produced firearms and weaponry

and caused duress to the staff members,

threatened them with violence and then robbed the store of £1,600

prior to leaving, still dressed in their fake uniforms.

The fake firefighters left behind not just an empty till,

but also a trail of emotional devastation.

The victim that had the firearms pointed at them

was so disturbed he in fact left employment

and has now returned to his homeland in Pakistan,

so this is the effect these people had on people,

they did actually put people in great terror.

There was no doubt in DCI Corner's mind

that the armed gang got as far as they did

because of their alter-egos as firefighters.

These guys were fake fire officers,

they'd never been fire officers they never will be fire officers,

and they were just using the disguise purely to trick

and gain the confidence of the potential robbery victims.

Using the same cover story of wanting to check fire alarms,

the gang went on to target an amusement arcade in Dagenham.

Again, the fake firemen used guns to get what they wanted,

and the victims were to pay a huge emotional price

for the £700 that the fake firefighters walked away with.

The security guard was forced down to the floor

and the female member of staff had a gun pushed into her stomach.

This was a particularly nasty experience for them

to be threatened with such violence with firearms.

and both of those members of staff, I would say,

haven't really recovered from this.

One of them's returned back overseas to where he came from

and the other lady is still quite upset and traumatised by this.

Over a nine-month period, the gang of fake firefighters

used handguns, knives and crowbars in over 20 robberies

across north and east London, stealing more than £200,000.

But the Met's Flying Squad were about to pour cold water

on their crime spree.

We're currently in Porters Avenue in Dagenham,

and this is where the crime spree

for the fake fire officers came to an abrupt end.

Lloyd, Griffiths and Stacey went on to commit an offence

at a nearby convenience store, where they stole £400.

They were pursued from the scene of the robbery.

Stacey immediately had given up and been arrested in one vehicle.

Lloyd and Griffiths made off in another.

Whilst being pursued, the gang hurled guns

and other pieces of evidence out of the window of their car,

but they wouldn't be on the road for long.

Their vehicle came to an abrupt halt.

Griffiths gave up, remained in the vehicle.

Lloyd ran across the road between the gaps in the houses,

opposite where we are, and was pursued by armed police officers,

having vaulted some fences, and was arrested in the garden nearby.

It was the end of the fake firefighters' reign of terror.

Ringleader Darren Lloyd was convicted

of a number of conspiracy to rob offences

and was jailed for 18 years.

Gary Griffiths was given five years.

The gang racked up a total of 50 years in jail between them.

For DCI Corner, it's a cautionary tale for members of the public.

Just because a person's wearing a uniform,

whether it be a police uniform, a fire officer

or some other sort of public service, don't just take it on face value.

Have a look at their identification, if you're not sure,

please make a phone call, please phone their depot

and if you're really not sure, please phone your local police,

and they'll come down and we're quite happy to check people out

because at the end of the day,

a genuine worker will not mind being asked for identification.

When it comes to the dangers of taking a uniform at face value,

Kalai learned the hard way.

The experience has shaken his trust in uniformed officials.

I always ask for ID after this occasion,

anyone comes in, it doesn't matter you know, police man in a uniform,

or a paramedic in a uniform, it doesn't matter,

it's just, "ID please."

Fingers crossed it won't happen again to me, that's what I think!

Felixstowe Port is Britain's biggest container port,

with over 3 million containers like these arriving here each year.

That's a lot of containers for Andy Darke from the UK Border Agency

to keep his eye on when he's playing spot-the-fake.

They try and hide it, you find it, you know? It is a big game.

We score the odd goal!

HE LAUGHS

In the many years that Andy's been working at Felixstowe,

he's seen the counterfeiters evolving

and constantly changing their tactics as they try to

get their fakes past the watchful eyes of the UK Border Agency.

The criminals used to smuggle fake products in all in one go.

But that's all changing.

Today, using one of a range of checks and measures

at the UK Border Agency's disposal,

Andy's discovered a box that doesn't do what it says on the label.

This is a consignment described as packing material

and when we opened the boxes, we found thousands and thousands

of Golden Virginia tobacco pouches.

At first sight, they're the real deal.

These look very professional.

They've even got the normal UK barcode on them,

there's no obvious spelling mistakes,

not that I'm quite sure my knowledge of all the different languages

would enable me to say that there is no spelling mistake.

These pouches are in fact just one part of a fake kit.

Rather than put it all in one box,

the fakers pack the individual component parts

of the tobacco pouches into separate boxes

in an attempt to avoid detection,

and in the hope that at least some will slip through.

Once the pouch has been filled with tobacco,

the pouch itself will go inside the cellophane wrapper,

and it will be heat-sealed across the end.

The fakers finishing touch is something to persuade consumers

that the rolling tobacco is real.

We have thousands and thousands of counterfeited Benelux tax-stamps.

The fakers want British consumers to think they're getting a good deal

on real smuggled tobacco.

And the people buying it think the reason it's cheap is that

it's been bought in Belgium and smuggled across

without any duty being paid.

There are many things the UK Border Agency check for

with products like this,

and the fakers have missed out a crucial detail.

Normally, there is a plastic snap seal that you press together

to keep it fresh, and that's obviously missing

from these packets.

If the smugglers had managed to slip these fake pouches,

and all their component parts, past Felixstowe Port

and into the country,

they would have filled those pouches with fake tobacco,

sold them, and made a killing.

It's a great result for the UK Border Agency.

And elsewhere at Felixstowe,

officer Lance Cruse can smell the sweet smell of success.

Here, we've got a shrink-wrapped sealed bag,

purporting to be a Guzell Turkish bath scrub

made in the United Arab Emirates.

And then on opening it up, we've got a black sacking, smells very fruity.

But you really wouldn't want to use this in your bath.

And there we have a popular brand of, in this case,

double apple Al Fakher molasses tobacco.

This is the current trend, bringing in a lot of this molasses tobacco,

it's not always concealed as well as this.

The people behind this sort of smuggling attempt

have paid a bit of money to get some labels made up

to try to put you off at first glance.

However, our job is to go deeper with these things

and to establish what's inside.

The team at Felixstowe have had some great results in their drive

to outwit the fakers.

But with another few million containers like these

due in this year, the game of cat and mouse isn't over yet.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd