Episode 6 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

BANG!

Get down! Get down! Put your hands behind your back now.

It's just an ordinary house, it could be anywhere in the country.

But this is a house that's filled with fakes.

And you may not know it,

but your home could be full of them, too.

During this series, we'll be investigating the criminals

trying to get their hands on your cash by using forgeries,

frauds and fakery.

And I'll be showing you how you can avoid being taken for a ride.

Today on Fake Britain,

we reveal the benefit fraudster who came back from the dead.

He faked his own death - and even his own ashes -

to escape the authorities...

We have prosecuted a lot of people,

we've brought a lot of fraudsters to justice.

'However, we've never had anybody fake their own death

'to avoid us getting to grips with them before.'

..we tell the tale of the biggest autograph forgery case

of modern times...

All the signatures in this book are fake, fake, fake. It's preposterous.

..and we meet the man who got burned after slapping on fake sun cream.

I was getting even hotter and my skin was getting even redder.

That's when I realised that perhaps something

might not be right with the sunscreen.

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl -

it's a brilliant story and now, it's not just a book,

it's been made into two films and also a musical.

If you don't know the story, where have you been? It's like this.

Charlie buys a bar of chocolate and in it, he finds a golden ticket

that gives him access to the chocolate factory

and free sweets for life. Magical.

But now, the fakers have latched on to a classic tale

and they're conning our kids - and you don't con kids.

MAJESTIC MUSIC PLAYS

When it comes to Britain's love of sweets and chocolate,

not very much has changed since Roald Dahl

penned his classic in 1964.

Collectively, kids across Britain eat tonnes every day

and one of those kids is Shay Kenny.

Shay would eat ten boxes of chocolates,

and ten bars of chocolate after it.

When Shay went to visit his grandmother Angela for a weekend,

she decided to get him a treat from her local shop,

so she splashed out on an expensive, big, shiny Wonka bar,

just like the ones from the film.

On the back of the bar it promised five lucky winners

would go to the chocolate factory.

When Shay opened it, it seemed the dream was about to come true.

Shay was excited to get the Wonka bar.

And he opened it and the gold ticket fell out.

We were all jumping up and down for joy

because we thought, "Wow! He's got the gold ticket."

I was really excited about getting the Wonka bar

and a golden ticket inside.

On the ticket, it said the visit would take place

at 10am on the first day of October.

We'll have a great day out. I was going to drive all the way to London

or wherever it may be.

But on closer inspection, something didn't seem quite right

about the chocolate bar.

I looked at the wrapper later. It was substandard wrapping,

and it wasn't a quality chocolate. I looked for a barcode - no barcode.

And no telephone number to get in touch with the company.

The shop confirmed there was a golden ticket in every bar,

and admitted they had bought the bars from a man in a white van.

It was a fake Wonka bar.

I was raging. It was terrible how they could do that to children

-because Shay was very excited.

-My nana phoned up the shop

and they said it was a fake,

and I realised that I was conned

and that I wasn't really getting to go to the factory.

I felt sad and annoyed that it wasn't really real.

Genuine Wonka bars were discontinued by Nestle in 2005.

The absence of the genuine bars, though,

has opened the door to the fakers.

A sweet shop in Cardiff was visited by a man trying to sell some

similarly suspect-looking chocolate. It WASN'T Willy Wonka!

The chap walked in wearing a tracksuit,

he didn't look particularly smart and started asking us

about what sweets we stocked,

and did we want to stock American sweets?

He particularly mentioned the Wonka bars and said that he

knew of suppliers and said he could get us in touch with them.

Nicky was unconvinced the man was a genuine salesman.

I wouldn't expect a supplier to walk in just dressed like that.

I would expect them to have...you know, a file, briefcase, suit.

The man's sample Wonka bar was equally suspect.

We looked at the bar. It did resemble the design of a Wonka bar,

but the quality of the paper wasn't quite right,

the print wasn't good either, it was slightly pixelated.

Nicky was concerned about who exactly was making the bars

and what was in them.

On the packaging, there wasn't the correct information,

it was very basic and with the standards of today,

it should have whether they're nut allergy, et cetera

and it just didn't have that information for us.

Not long after, the shop was visited once again

by another chocolate-bar faker.

It was a couple of weeks later, we had a lady came into the store

and she asked us if we actually stocked Wonka bars

and we don't often have a lot of people coming in asking for them

because we do pride ourselves on having our British products.

We said we didn't stock them and she left,

and then within about five minutes, another guy came in

saying he was a supplier of the Wonka bars

and were we interested in stocking them.

I would say they were working together

to obviously try and build the business within Cardiff.

And not an Oompa-Loompa in sight.

Convinced these Wonka bars were fakes,

Nicky contacted Cardiff Trading Standards.

Handley Brustad was already investigating the suspect chocolate.

He'd been getting reports of dodgy Wonka bars

right across Britain.

We've contacted Nestle

and it turns out that they are not their product in any way

and, in fact, someone else is just using their trademark

without their permission.

Handley was concerned kids across the UK

were being conned by the promise of a golden ticket.

Strangely enough, there were golden tickets in ALL the bars.

Now, who's going to win?

Out of all these people that had a golden ticket,

there is no competition, there's no winners,

there's no prize, there is just disappointment in this.

This is a fake golden ticket.

It means nothing and it's going to get you nowhere, unfortunately.

Using a fake competition to sell a product is illegal.

But Handley was also concerned about the lack of information

on the back of the wrapper.

This was an early one that's got no ingredients listing.

It doesn't give information on allergens at all,

which is a requirement under the food labelling regulations,

and this is what consumers need to know.

As you look at some of the other labels,

you will notice suddenly the ingredients list are added,

but again, no allergen list. And then you come to another one

where they've added the ingredients list,

they've added the allergens and this time,

they've added the best before date as well.

So, over time, fakers have cleverly kept changing the packaging,

adding more information to make the bars seem genuine.

Early tests revealed there was so little cocoa in the counterfeits

they were literally fake chocolate. What?!

When Handley had some tested, it was discovered

the fakers had simply repackaged cheap supermarket chocolate.

You can go to one of the supermarkets

and you can buy that for 80 or 90p.

There's a huge mark-up on these

and they're just there to make a profit.

A quick search on the internet reveals hundreds of fake Wonka bars

but it also shows wrappers and moulds for sale.

That suggests fakers are also mixing their own

poor-quality chocolate and passing it off as the premium Wonka bar

AND charging up to £6.

Handley believes opportunistic fakers have set up their own

cheap fake DIY chocolate businesses in backrooms across Britain.

Some have even spelt the brand name

with two Vs and an R to avoid the law.

That's rubbish.

Nestle do produce a range of sweets under the Wonka brand, that's true,

and you'll see them in lots of these sweet shops.

What they don't do at this present time is make a Wonka chocolate bar.

Therefore if anyone out there sees Wonka bars for sale,

they are fake.

The elaborate fraud has left kids like Shay,

and grandma Angela, fuming.

They're promising children a dream.

Their parents are spending extra money on that chocolate

trying to give their child that dream when times are hard

and it's all fraud.

The wrapping's fake, the chocolate's fake and the gold ticket's fake.

When you're putting a product on your skin -

whether it's a moisturiser, sun cream or make-up -

you want to be totally confident that that product is OK.

And that's why many of us opt for big-name manufacturers

and products that we recognise.

But, as this is the Fake Britain house,

of course, these are all examples of skin products that are fake.

We don't know who made them, or what's gone in to them.

And, as you can see, some of them are intended for babies.

The fakers here aren't just making money at our expense,

they're putting our health at risk.

Every year, millions of us take a holiday.

And the one experience that unites us - putting on sun cream.

Whether you're on Brighton or Bondi Beach,

we all slap on the white stuff to stop getting burned.

But what if you put on the sun cream and you still get burned?

Well then, perhaps you've been a victim of the fakers.

Greg Wesson is a Canadian who lives in London.

In between jobs, he decided on a sun-drenched vacation

on a small island in the Caribbean. Nice.

I decided to get away, do a little relaxation,

go somewhere sunny and warm.

But I didn't want to check a bag

so I decided I would buy toiletries when I got there.

When Greg arrived, he picked up what he thought was L'Oreal sun cream

from a local grocery and headed out for a long walk around the island.

About 45 minutes after I set off, I started to notice

that my skin was feeling very hot

and I could see the top of my feet were starting to get very red.

So I decided to reapply some of the sunscreen again

and continue my walk.

After about 15 minutes, I realised that I was getting even hotter

and my skin was getting even redder and that's when I realised

that perhaps something might not be right with the sunscreen.

Greg pulled out the sun cream to take a closer look.

When he examined it, he realised he'd been had.

I noticed a lot of the words were misspelt, there were foreign words

mixed in with the English.

Underneath the brand L'Oreal,

it said "Let You Enjoy Yourself Entirely In Facial."

'It makes no sense at all.

'I don't know if it's some sort of mistranslation

'of the L'Oreal slogan, "because you're worth it," or what,

'but it's illogical. On the back,'

the instructions and ingredients are in a mixture of languages.

It says, "double protection, quotidienne extra large,

"fluide leger et non gras." The grammar makes no sense at all.

Greg had been sold fake sun cream,

useless as protection against the harsh Caribbean sun.

He was burned to a crisp, and was stranded on the island

for two weeks without any lotion.

The one shop there sold the fake cream. It ruined his trip.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any other sunscreen on the island,

so I ended up having to make sure I wore a big hat and long pants

and full shoes for the rest of the trip.

So, fake skincare products can be ineffective,

but they can also be dangerous. Welcome to the heart of Wales.

It's famous for its very pale woolly residents - there they are -

and rolling green hills.

But as one Trading Standards officer found out,

it's also the location of a growing trade in counterfeit cosmetics.

Clive Jones is the head of Powys Trading Standards.

His team's two-year investigation into fake make-up revealed

a multitude of fraudsters flogging suspect slap online.

Massive sums of moneys were involved.

We identified the regional targets that we could do something about.

Clive mobilised his team and dawn swoops were made

on three addresses in Powys, Glamorgan and Monmouthshire.

Vast quantities of counterfeit make-up were seized.

Right, this is the property store of Powys County Council.

And the storeroom is stuffed with fake make-up.

In this case - it's under the brand MAC, it's a long make-up brush -

could command £20-30 and potentially more.

Amongst the colossal haul, Clive found fake versions

of almost every make-up brand on the market.

Maybelline, Lancome, Max Factor, MAC...

Really, a massive array of different companies

where the brands have been breached by the sale of counterfeits.

Clive had uncovered an illicit cottage industry.

Fraudsters were buying in shipments of fake make-up from China

and then posting it out across the UK from their front rooms.

Customers thought it was from Paris, not Powys.

One target we looked at was Leanne Wertheim.

We'd identified her as being linked to three accounts on eBay

with something like over £20,000 that appeared to have been

sold through the accounts.

During the warrant, we identified something like just short of

800 products. This was just an ordinary, residential home,

you know, where all the items are stored in cabinets,

in kitchens, in lounges, et cetera.

As well as the copyright breaches, Clive was determined to find out

whether these fake goods were dangerous.

Examples of the fake make-up were brought here

to Staffordshire Scientific Services.

Simon Cull tested the products.

The samples were heated and various chemicals added

so the make-up could then be analysed.

Simon was looking for the presence of heavy metals such as lead,

which is carefully regulated in legitimate make-up.

In extreme cases, lead poisoning can cause seizures and even death.

Simon was alarmed to discover that the amount of lead

in the fake Max Factor mascara was off the chart.

In one of the samples we analysed, we found over 20 times

the legal limit of lead. Over a prolonged period of time,

this could have severe damage to the central nervous system.

The reason the legislation is there is to protect the public

from toxic chemicals from being in their products.

In this case, cosmetics.

You wouldn't want to be applying that every day

with that sort of level.

Illegal quantities of lead were also found in other products.

Clive Jones was stunned to learn the toxic nature

of the make-up that he'd seized.

To have a product which was over 20 times the limit was horrific.

Make-up fakers James Jones, David Foster and Leanne Wertheim

were successfully prosecuted and fined

at Cardiff Crown Court for selling counterfeit cosmetics.

The value of the goods sold was £125,000.

The fraudsters were prepared to sell dangerous fakes for use on the skin

without any care for the men and women using them.

But Fake Britain has learned fraudsters faking skincare products

are now even targeting children.

Kari Aslam is a senior Trading Standards officer in Newham, London.

He was amazed when Johnson & Johnson got in touch

to inform him they'd had reports that fake versions

of their baby lotion were being sold in Newham.

Kari made a test purchase from local store, Pound City.

From the packaging itself, the word "clinically" was misspelt.

It was actually spelt "clinicaily", with an extra I in the middle.

There's grammatical errors on back. The apostrophes on

at least two occasions on the back are at bottom of the word "don't".

Testing revealed the fake contained high levels of acidity

and dangerous levels of chemicals called parabens

which could damage the sensitive skin of babies.

Kari Aslam had to act fast to prevent the sale of even more fakes.

Very young babies' skins are absorbing this stuff

that could be really, really serious and really, really harmful.

Kari organised coordinated raids on the two branches of Pound City.

On the day we went into the store, all these items on the left were

arranged on the shelf with other cosmetics at very cheap prices.

59 more bottles were also found at the Pound City in Thurrock.

Kari questioned owner Akhtar Shabarz about the origin of the fakes.

He said he'd actually bought it from a small Indian man in a van

and the invoice showed he'd actually purchased 240 bottles.

The details on the invoice were also fake,

and the white van man was never traced.

Pound City director Shabarz was fined £8,000

at Basildon Magistrates Court for breaching safety regulations

and for trademark offences.

What he was doing was trying to maximise his profit margin

with disregard to the law and the safety

of very vulnerable young babies, basically.

When it comes to any fake skin product,

there can be clear ways to spot a counterfeit.

Look out for obvious spelling mistakes on the packaging.

Sometimes, they're more subtle.

And if you're buying goods online,

watch out for lots of negative feedback.

Coming up, we meet the man who came back to life - a benefit cheat who

faked his own death and cremation urn to escape the authorities.

And we tell the tale of the dentist responsible for one

of the biggest frauds ever recorded against the NHS.

Rare books can be highly collectable and very valuable.

And if they've got the signature of the author or a well-known owner,

they can be worth even more.

Take this lot. They'd be worth £25,000

if the signatures in them were real, but they're not. They're fakes.

Look at this. First edition of Kidnapped, supposedly signed

by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. This would be worth £10,000.

This is the story of the faker who made his fortune,

and I promise you, it's a real page-turner.

Pom Harrington is one of London's best-known antique book dealers.

He was excited about viewing a rare set of signed first-edition books

by wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

Little did Pom know, though, they would lead him

to unravel the largest autograph forging case of modern times.

So the books come in, I start to look at them,

I look at the first one. It's signed on the title page,

little bit unusual but that's OK, it's all very plausible.

Second one, hmmm... Yeah, not quite happy.

Third one, fourth one...and I started getting a deep,

uncomfortable feeling as I went through each book

looking at them, opening them up, looking at the title page,

and something didn't quite sit right with me.

The collector who'd brought the books to Pom had been sold them

on the basis they were from the collection of Neville Duke,

a heroic pilot from the Second World War.

But strangely, there was no trace of any inscriptions

to Neville Duke inside.

If Winston Churchill presented Neville Duke with a set of books,

he would not have presented him just with a signed copy of the book.

Winston Churchill, if he knew the person's name,

would absolutely use his name, and you would expect to see,

"To Neville Duke, from Winston Churchill," and the date.

The collector agreed Pom could take a closer look

at the books overnight. He found more irregularities.

Each signed Churchill book should have been worth £2,000.

But as Pom examined them,

he discovered pencil prices of around £40 and £50.

They'd been erased out, but you could still see the shadow,

the ghost of where the pencil had been, so that's a big alarm bell,

ie, the suggestion therefore is that someone bought this

for £30 at a second-hand book shop

and these must have been signed after that pricing.

Sensing a fraud, Pom broke the news to the collector.

He revealed he'd bought many more books from the same suspect source,

spending thousands on them over a number of years.

All were allegedly signed Churchill books from the estate

of Neville Duke. Pom offered to examine them,

and found another glaring mistake in every single one.

I sat down actually with all 68 items

and actually went through everything,

book by book by book. Winston Churchill would sign his name

and normally at the end, he has a little loop under his double L.

It goes like this and the forger did it the wrong way round,

and it was upside down.

We described it as a happy face, unhappy face,

and that was the tell through the whole collection.

These things were fake, no question.

The collector revealed he'd bought all of the books from this man,

Allan Formhals, an antiques dealer based in Southampton.

Pom decided to contact the Metropolitan Police's

Art and Antiques Unit.

Ian Lawson's the officer who took on the case.

He set about investigating Formhals,

who also seemed to be selling vast numbers of books online.

Researching into his internet profile and the sales history,

we recognised he'd sold a large proportion of items -

not only in the UK but also abroad in Canada, in the United States,

in France and various other places.

So we realised this was going to be quite a large inquiry,

quite a large investigation for us.

Ian raided Formhals' house.

As well as more signed Churchill books, memorabilia featuring

forged Churchill signatures was also seized.

We have here just a photograph of Winston Churchill.

It's probably worth a few pence, maybe a few pounds.

But again, add the signature of Winston Churchill at the bottom

and that'll go for a couple of hundred pounds

A magazine there. Again, add Winston Churchill's signature to it,

substantially increases the value of it.

Invitation cards for a 1961 private view of some drawings.

Again, Winston Churchill's signature you can see at the bottom.

Ian also seized a host of other first edition books,

by Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson and other authors bearing

what he suspected to be their forged signatures.

We have a book, The Cocktail Party, TS Eliot

and what you'll see is the purported signature of TS Eliot there.

And again, a book probably picked up for a few pounds,

add the signature of Eliot,

you're going to substantially increase the value.

To confirm that the signatures on items seized at Formhals' house

were also fake, Ian enlisted the help of autograph specialist,

Felix Pryor.

Felix examined everything from books by Picasso

to letters allegedly signed by Tolkien.

He was astounded by what appeared to be two books

filled with the autographs of famous writers.

The smoking gun, to use that horrible cliche,

shall we say the splattering nib, was the two visitors' books

where the forger had just been practising signatures.

Here, we have a whole page of Tolkien.

I mean, that...that's terrible.

-Here we have...

-HE LAUGHS

Oh! This is just an entire page of Thomas Hardy.

That Tolkien and that Hardy, for instance,

they're getting pretty similar.

They're sort of morphing into each other.

Handwriting is an unconscious activity.

When you write your signature, it's like riding a bicycle,

whereas a forger is trying to disguise what is natural to him,

but there is an underlying handwriting,

which will be the forger's own hand, which will come out.

If you just spin on, Picasso suddenly pops in

to have a cup of Rioja.

And the guest list gets more and more impressive.

Look, we've got a fantastic line-up here, chaps.

We've got Thomas Hardy, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Winston S Churchill,

Arthur Conan Doyle and Picasso.

Now, that's quite a dinner party, isn't it? My gosh!

Mark Twain, John Constable, that is...

He used to write his Cs like that.

Now, we're getting seriously bonkers here.

William Wordsworth, that's a rough imitation.

If these are genuine, if these aren't fakes,

I'm the Pope, you know. I mean, it's preposterous.

This is spectacular. Now, he's using different inks.

You've got a wonderful assemblage.

JM Barrie, doesn't look anything like his handwriting, really.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, that's Charles Dickens,

which is not a good imitation, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh,

WB Yeats pops up, and here, this is Oliver Cromwell -

who'd been dead for a good few hundred years,

and is not known to have used a fountain pen

since they hadn't been invented!

The books contain thousands of practice signatures.

For Felix, they proved Formhals' guilt beyond a doubt.

It is impossible that all these people got together at the same time

to have a jolly practice of their signatures.

One can say - it's not just a question of opinion -

one can say with 100% certainty

that all the signatures in this book are fake, fake, fake.

It's preposterous.

Also found at Formhals' house were pen and inks,

specialist books on handwriting, and a note from people

Formhals had asked to look out for second-hand books.

Mr Formhals had clearly befriended some local people

who were purchasing unsigned books on his behalf.

These then became signed and sold on the internet by Mr Formhals.

But despite the overwhelming weight of evidence,

Allan Formhals refused to admit his guilt.

He maintained his innocence, saying all the books that he'd sold

that were signed were purchased by him from various car boot sales,

and when he purchased them, they were signed.

Ian had to prove that Formhals had bought the books unsigned,

and the signatures had been added before he sold them on.

12 giant books found at the faker's house would prove this beyond doubt.

What we established was that these books were deposited

by an unknown person at the local recycling plant

near to where Allan Formhals lived

and we traced some witnesses that looked inside these books

and could confirm that when they looked at them, they were unsigned.

However, when we raided Mr Formhals' house,

we actually found the signature of Winston Churchill

quite clearly displayed on all 12 volumes.

And we also found evidence that he had tried to sell these books

signed by Winston Churchill. So that disproved his case.

Allan Formhals was found guilty of ten counts of fraud

at Southampton Crown Court and was sentenced to ten months in jail.

He's appealing his conviction and sentence.

We were very pleased with the result and it sends out a message

to fraudsters, people forging signatures, buying books

or art fraud in general, that we will try to prosecute them,

bring them to trial, and we will also try and seize their assets

if they're found guilty at court.

Some fakers go to extraordinary lengths to make money,

and their deceptions are so complex that they can take years to unravel.

We've discovered one man who not only faked his own death,

he even faked his own ashes.

This is the unbelievable story of an extraordinary fraud

involving a bottle of vodka,

a Thai jail, a dead Russian tramp and a cremation urn.

But it began with a fake housing benefit claim

in Shepherd's Bush, London.

Mark Dalton is the head of the anti-fraud department

at Hammersmith and Fulham Council.

He was passed the case of a persistent housing benefit fraudster

named Stephen Kellaway.

He's claiming to live at 1st Floor, 105 Coningham Road, London.

And we can see that he's saying he has a landlady

who lives at 58 Munster Square, London NW1.

This is Stephen Kellaway's first application for housing benefit.

He claimed he was a tenant, and didn't own any property.

It asks the question, "Do you own any land or other property

"in this country or abroad?"

and we can clearly see he's ticked the "no" box.

In fact, Land Registry documents showed Kellaway

owned the very property at which he was claiming to be a tenant.

Not only did he own this property where he was claiming benefit

as a private tenant, he also owned several other properties -

three or four - at the same time he'd filled this form in.

No-one now living at either the Coningham or Munster Road properties

is connected with the fraud.

At the time, Kellaway was prosecuted for housing benefit fraud,

but within three months, the faker applied once again for benefits.

The resulting investigation was soon to take an extraordinary twist.

Mark discovered Kellaway was renting out one of his properties

to tenants and committing benefit fraud on many levels.

He was not resident at the address he was claiming at,

he had a partner he hadn't declared on his claim,

he had other adults living at the household

which hadn't been declared on the claim, and he had income

from those other adults who were his lodgers or tenants.

Kellaway still owned various houses himself.

His wife Nelli was busy committing benefit fraud

in a neighbouring borough of Richmond.

Mark liaised with Kellaway's tenant,

and hatched a plan to arrest the pair of fakers.

It was to this address here in Shepherd's Bush

where council officers came hoping and expecting to find the Kellaways

arriving to collect the rent.

This is the property here and the plan was to call the police

and have them arrested if they did indeed turn up that evening.

However, Mark and his team were about to get a big surprise.

Only one of the fakers arrived.

Nelli Kellaway turned up, alone. No Stephen Kellaway

and then the police were called to come and effect an arrest.

Nelli Kellaway's explanation was that she had

just returned from holiday in Russia where she'd been with Stephen

and Stephen had recently died of pneumonia in Russia.

We were extremely surprised.

We'd expected Stephen to be with Nelli or at the very least,

to be back in the country with her.

Nelli Kellaway produced a stunning bit of evidence to convince Mark

and his team of her husband's death, from pneumonia in a railway station.

Here we have the urn which Nelli Kellaway was in possession of

at the time she was arrested.

This was supposed to contain the remains of Stephen Kellaway,

who had recently died in Russia.

With no evidence to the contrary, Mark had no choice

but to believe Nelli Kellaway's version of events.

She was prosecuted for her offences, and forced to repay over £50,000.

But it was over a year later, when Mark became aware that perhaps

Stephen Kellaway wasn't quite as dead as his wife had made out.

Reports came to us that Stephen Kellaway was likely

to still be alive and this investigative journalist

had apparently tracked down some relatives

somewhere in the south of England

who had confirmed that they believed he was still alive.

It appeared that Kellaway hadn't died in a Russian railway station

in 2008 after all.

The faker was located now in Thailand,

living penniless and traipsing the streets.

Mark Dalton was stunned.

We have investigated many, many cases,

often for tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands -

of pounds of fraud, but we'd never come across one

where one of the perpetrators had apparently died

and then apparently wasn't dead after all.

And bizarrely, the faker was now desperate to return to the UK.

It appeared he'd had enough of this life on the run

as a destitute person. He was for a while incarcerated

by the Thai authorities, we believe on the basis of either begging

or on the basis of entering the country under a false identity.

With the help of the Serious Organised Crime Agency,

Stephen Kellaway was extradited back to the UK.

Under interview, the full story of his unbelievable fakery emerged.

Stephen Kellaway informed us that the method used to fake his death

in Russia was to pay a Russian mortuary worker

to place his passport into the pocket of a dead tramp.

And the price the fraudster had paid the worker in the morgue

was a bottle of vodka.

Kellaway had later secretly returned to the UK.

Exploiting a legal loophole, he obtained a fake passport

in the name of a dead child and used this to travel to Thailand.

Mark also made a discovery about a £1.7 million insurance policy.

When we searched their various properties,

we did uncover some life insurance documents.

Stephen's life had been insured for significant sums.

Stephen Kellaway was sentenced to two and a half years in prison

at Croydon Crown Court.

The master faker admitted three counts of benefit fraud

and possession and use of a false identification document.

The case was solved.

But Mark Dalton was left with one final riddle - that fake urn.

No idea what's inside it. It's clearly not Stephen Kellaway.

For all we know, it could be garden material and baking powder.

Who knows?

These are dental records.

They detail the procedures and treatments carried out by a dentist

on a patient. They're also the way that the dentist

can then charge the NHS for the work done,

so they're important documents,

but what if the information contained in them was fake?

What if the work had never actually been done?

What if the patient was actually dead

at the time when the work should have been carried out?

Records like these were used by one woman to commit

one of the largest NHS frauds of all time, and it's something

that cost you and me a small fortune.

Welcome to NHS Protect.

They're charged with tackling fraud across the Health Service.

Clive Wyke is a senior counter-fraud specialist.

He was referred a case in which Joyce Trail -

a dentist who specialised in seeing elderly patients -

appeared to have a superhuman workload.

Dr Trail's contract was for over 36,000 units

of dental activity per year. Putting it in layman's terms,

that would equate to 17 check-ups per hour,

eight hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year.

It was an impossible amount of work for a single dentist,

so Clive decided to investigate further.

He was about to uncover one of the biggest frauds ever

perpetrated against the NHS by an individual.

As Clive began to examine records for patients

treated by Dr Trail, he encountered a strange irregularity.

It was probably within the first 20 names that I'd checked

that I found a person that had been deceased

at the time of their treatment.

Joyce Trail had charged the NHS for treating a patient

when that person was actually dead.

Alarmed, Clive visited 15 care homes with patients

allegedly under the care of Dr Trail.

He discovered that unbeknownst to the homes,

she was making fake claims on an epic scale.

Dentures should be changed approximately every five years,

but Trail was cheating the system,

claiming multiple sets for different patients.

Over the period of three years,

this person had 11 dentures fitted for them.

That number of dentures would be highly abnormal.

As Clive ploughed through the records,

he found many more fake patients that Trail claimed to have treated.

During the course of the investigation we identified

in excess of 120 people who were deceased at the time of treatment.

This record card relates to a lady that allegedly received

seven sets of dentures in the period 2007 to 2009.

Unfortunately, this lady died in December 2006,

so we can be pretty sure that all of these claims submitted are false.

The fraudster's surgery was raided

and vast numbers of documents were seized.

These are four boxes of record cards out of a total

of about 45 boxes seized from the dental practice.

Clive and his team painstakingly went through 80,000 pieces of paper,

comparing them with the records held by the care homes.

Patients' signatures or carers' signatures,

we were able to show to nursing home staff

and ask if they were theirs,

and the majority of these turned out that they weren't.

Trail had faked many hundreds of signatures to assist her

in her fraud. But Clive also found thousands of invoices

and statements for dentures made by a specialist denture-maker.

If much of Trail's work was fake, then why did she have these invoices

from a legitimate practice? Clive decided to pay him a visit.

Robert Lawrence is based in central Birmingham.

Clive compared Trail's records with the denture-maker's.

Although he'd done some work for Dr Trail,

there were some startling differences between their records.

I was absolutely horrified by it.

I could clarify with him that they were made up,

they weren't ours at all, they were all fake

because where, on a normal month,

we did around about £1,000 worth of work a month with Dr Trail,

these ranged from 3,000 up to about 7,000.

If we'd done that amount of work on a regular basis,

we would've seriously had to employ somebody else to work with us.

Trail had created the fake invoices from scratch

using Robert Lawrence's name.

These were absolutely fake. The whole page layout was totally wrong

compared to how our statements go out.

There were numbers on there that were not consistent

with our numbering system.

Despite earning a fortune through her fakery,

Joyce Trail failed to fully pay Mr Lawrence

for the small amount of work he HAD done for her.

We're owed about £3,500 which is outstanding

from over three years ago, and that figure is still outstanding today.

You ARE angry cos at the end of the day, it's three and a half month's

worth of work that you've made, that she's claimed for.

Faker Joyce Trail was defrauding the NHS

through the use of fake patients, fake appointments

and fake paperwork.

Joyce Trail set up a fraud factory producing fake documents

on an industrial scale. We established that 75% of all

the claims that Dr Trail submitted were false.

And receipts recovered from her surgery revealed that Trail

was splashing the cash on a lavish life of hotels and holidays.

A two-night stay at Sandy Lane in Barbados costing £1,707.

At Birmingham Crown Court,

Joyce Trail was sentenced to seven years in prison

for defrauding the NHS of £1.4 million.

In total, she filed 7,000 fake invoices.

This is the largest ever prison sentence handed out to an individual

following an NHS investigation.

That's all from Fake Britain. Bye-bye.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd