Episode 9 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

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 the series we'll be investigating the criminals

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

frauds and fakery. I'll be showing you

how you can avoid being taken for a ride.

Today on Fake Britain.

We reveal the fake X-ray device intended for British dental clinics.

Spraying X-rays around the room.

People are liable to develop cancers, tumours,

all sorts of health problems.

We tell the tale of one of the biggest art forgers of modern times.

He admitted painting four or five paintings a week for five years,

so we were aware there were probably over 1,000 paintings out in the art market.

And you'll hear the story of the mystery Chinese fakers

and their extraordinary fraud on a South London high street.

A member of the public had seen a suspicious vehicle in Compton Road by Wimbledon library.

He had seen wires coming out of the bonnet of the car.

He suspected it may be involved in terrorism.

Does anyone actually like going to the dentist?

I mean, having someone poke around inside your mouth

with pointy little implements and then there is injections

and X-rays. Wouldn't it be even worse and more worrying

if it turned out that those tools were in fact fake?

As you might expect, from the Fake Britain house,

all of these are, and it's amazing the lengths

the fakers will go to to wipe the smiles off our faces.

On Fake Britain, we've featured the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency,

or MHRA, because of their war on counterfeit drugs.

We've been with them as they've carried out numerous raids

to bring the dealers of fake medicines to justice.

But they are also engaged in a less well-known battle

against counterfeit medical equipment.

Terrifyingly, during a recent raid in Portsmouth,

the enforcement team seized a shipment of fake X-ray devices,

destined for UK dental clinics.

Advertised online as being made by Kodak,

they are actually cheap copies.

One of the scanners has been brought here to King's College London

to be tested.

Dental X-ray units are used to capture images of patient's teeth.

They emit powerful X-rays and can be either wall-mounted or handheld.

Whilst the fake was being sold for £300,

genuine machines cost thousands.

They contain sophisticated lead shielding to protect patients

and operators from radiation.

The scientists at King's College are concerned that as well

as being a fake this cheap counterfeit unit could be dangerous.

Testing the unit is radiation expert Donald Emerton.

There are suggestions that this is not an adequately shielded unit,

not enough protection to stop radiation getting to the operator,

and we are concerned about the dose to the patient as well.

Donald and his team are setting up an experiment to test

the radiation exposure levels.

We are going to place these detectors around the skull phantom

and the unit to detect the radiation dosages and leakage.

We are going to put it where there are radio-sensitive organs

on the patient and where the operator's hands and body would be.

Sensors are placed in key areas sensitive to radiation -

the eyes of the patient, and the hands and body of the operator.

Once they are all in place, the experiment begins.

We have come round to this side as this is lead acrylic glass

so we are actually protected from the radiation here.

Donald takes an exposure.

The radiation readings are off the scale.

He's genuinely shocked.

We would have expected all of those sensors

to stay within the green markings. The fact that any of them

went beyond that is an issue of concern to us.

Donald is particularly alarmed by the massive exposure

to the patient's eye.

We would expect there to be some dose to the patient's eye,

but nowhere near as high as we were showing there.

But it's not just the power of the X-rays -

it's the huge area they're covering.

The fake unit sprays X-rays across the patient's entire face,

irradiating their brain and eye.

Continued exposure to this could leave someone blind.

The cornea of the eye is sensitive to radiation,

so any damage to it can lead to impaired vision.

But the readings reveal the most devastating effect

would be to the operator - the person using the machine

every day and repeatedly exposed to the powerful X-rays.

The results so far are showing that there is an increased dose

to the operator, which is unacceptable.

Over time, an operator using this in a dental practice

would receive a higher dose of radiation, and this would lead

to a greater risk of cancer.

The results of the test have been sent back to Danny Lee Frost,

head of enforcement at the agency. He's understandably appalled.

Further testing also revealed another dangerous fault.

This is the on/off switch that starts the exposure,

so the dentist would hold this part,

the assistant may be holding the scanner itself.

The dentist then opens the switch and presses the button

to start exposure. After a few seconds, stops.

However, when this was tested, the whole thing was live,

and the exposure was running as soon as the cover was released.

So even though he hasn't pressed the button, the thing is still

exposing everyone to X-rays.

In practice, this could be horrific.

Unshielded devices spraying X-rays around a room - people are liable

to develop cancers, tumours, all sorts of health problems.

But the scanners weren't the only thing seized on the raid.

Tens of thousands of counterfeit low-grade dental tools were also

found at the address - all intended for British dental clinics.

The CE mark on the products, a European validation of safety,

is completely fake.

This is a dental drill.

Anyone who has been to the dentist will have

seen one of these. Big long cable on the end. A variety of attachments

can go on this point - drills, cleaning, polishing - all sorts.

It's actually got a CE mark on it. That is fake.

This has been nowhere near a CE mark body.

It's so poor quality, that as soon as this would be plugged in to the

power unit, so pressure coming through here to turn the little wheels in here,

the whole thing is liable to explode. It's such poor quality.

If the whole thing comes apart when it is in someone's mouth, there

could be some serious consequences not only for the patient,

but the person holding it. It's going to explode in their hand!

If the drill had any sharp implements

attached at the time, the results could be tragic.

Essentially that's going into somebody's mouth.

If this component part explodes,

the dentist will be holding that, it's going to explode,

it's going to go everywhere

and that's going to go through the side of somebody's face.

The full range of different tools they found are very poor quality

and not fit for use in ANY dental surgery.

That would probably snap after a couple of uses like that.

It's very soft. A couple of pokes about in someone's mouth,

that's liable to snap. These things are shoddy,

poor quality, liable to disintegrate, fall apart,

explode, break, snap in somebody's mouth,

which if you think about it, if you're lucky,

you'll spit them out, if you're not they will end up inside you.

Despite this discovery, no-one really knows

how much fake equipment is already out there

being used in dental surgeries across Britain.

If any dentist has bought any of this, then let us know.

If any dentist is thinking of buying it, then don't. Products such

as these should only be bought from a recognised, reputable source.

What do you think? I think he's captured my likeness perfectly.

It's a fake, and you know what?

Art fraud is a lot more common than you might think.

Experts tell us that fakes are being sold online and at auctions

all the time, and many of them go undetected for years.

But when you are the most prolific faker of modern times,

eventually you'll end up with a red face.

John Meers is a keen art collector.

He often buys pieces online,

so when he spotted a painting by a famous Moroccan artist,

Jilali Gharbaoui, at a very good price,

he jumped at the chance to buy it.

We bid on it, bought it, did a bit of research on the artist.

Thought, "Hmm, I think this is actually worth quite a lot of money."

John paid £600 for the piece.

Not long afterwards, he spotted another well-priced painting for sale online.

This time by Indian painter SH Raza,

one of the Bombay Progressive Movement of painters from the 1950s,

as I'm sure you know.

Similar - abstract, very bright, colourful.

It didn't strike me at the time that it was coming from the same area of the country.

John bid on it and bought the picture.

I think it was...around £1,200, 1,300, I think.

More than I would normally have paid, in all honesty,

but it was a lovely picture.

The paintings were potentially worth quite a bit of money.

John loved the pictures,

but wondered if it might be time to capitalise on them.

We had works to do on the house, so we felt that it might be worth

taking them to Bonhams and saying, "What do we think?

"Are they worth selling?"

The auction house was impressed, and the pictures were entered

into an auction in Dubai, where they sold for £20,000.

John Meers couldn't believe his luck.

You can actually follow the auction live and you look at the screen

and you think, "That much money!"

We felt ecstatic, basically. It was great, you know.

We had suddenly had 20,000 in the bank.

We could put in the new kitchen and do the decoration we wanted to do.

Everything begins to roll and you get carried away.

You think, "I've done it once, we can do it again."

Another picture claiming to be by the same Indian group of artists

soon turned up online.

Believing he was on a winning streak, John snapped it up.

It was a picture entitled Barney The Doorman.

Which was a portrait pertaining to be of the doorman of a club

in London, to which most of the artists at that time went to.

The picture was supposedly by Francis Newton Souza.

John splashed out another £1,600.

It was more than he had paid before,

but he believed he had stumbled on another neglected masterpiece.

It had been owned by an old lady, who was in a home,

who was the wife of an art dealer,

who had basically willed all of this collection to the old people's home,

who then when it had closed down had sold them off at a local sale.

The seller told John he had more paintings from the same collection,

so he bought two more, and was soon tempted to sell them as well.

We had been on holiday to Turkey

and thought a holiday home in Turkey would be lovely.

John's local auctioneers thought Barney alone

could be worth £40-60,000, so he sent them off to London.

But this time there was a problem.

Charlie Moore, an expert in the paintings of the Bombay Progressive Group,

who was working at Bonhams at the time, was concerned.

An abnormally large number of paintings by the group

had been coming onto the market. All had slightly strange features.

So when John Meers's painting "Barney" turned up, Charlie

immediately spotted there was something not quite right about it.

There are numerous elements to this painting that are very strange

and are not in keeping with works you'd see by him

from the early '60s. The date is 1961.

The signature, whilst it bears resemblance to signatures by Souza

from that period, is not fine. It's not a very good example.

Souza was known for putting paint on the canvas with a palette knife.

But Charlie noticed something strange about the surface of the piece.

From afar, it appears that the paint has been applied

with a palette knife.

Whereas upon close inspection, you can see that it's actually

been applied with a paintbrush, which is another tell-tale sign

that there's something not quite right.

Bonhams were also concerned by the fact that none of the paintings

had any supporting documentation saying where they had come from.

Sensing a fraud, Charlie and his team returned John's paintings

and contacted the famous Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit.

Coming up, we hear how the unit unravelled one of the greatest

art frauds of recent times.

This was a huge operation, almost a conveyor belt.

Every so often a member of the British public spots something

that doesn't quite look right, and if they have the nous to report,

it can unravel a crime that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

That's exactly what happened on the streets of south London

where a system was in place to help people cheat

on the exam for British citizenship.

They were helping to create Fake Britons.

Everyone's heard of Wimbledon

thanks to the tennis, the Common and the Wombles,

but it's not so well-known for high-tech fakery.

All that was about to change

when Inspector Dominic Washington received a strange phone call.

A member of the public had seen a suspicious vehicle

in Compton Road by Wimbledon Library.

He had seen wires coming out of the bonnet of the car

and he was unhappy with it.

He suspected it may be involved in terrorism, so he called police,

so I decided to go to the call to find out exactly what was happening.

I pulled up in Compton Road just along here

and I found the car exactly where the gentleman had said.

The vehicle, the BMW, was parked here,

just outside the library in a side street, next to Wimbledon Library,

and it had as described, the wires coming from under the bonnet,

three people in it. They had computers,

they had electronic equipment all around them in the car.

In the front were two people, a man and a woman,

and in the back was one gentleman on his own.

The scene looked very suspicious.

Dominic asked the people to step out of the car

so he could question them.

When I got the couple out of the car,

they were very pleasant and polite.

They said it was a simple misunderstanding.

The father of the lady who was with them

was simply looking for premises nearby to buy a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant.

They were watching on their computers some Chinese television

and that is why they had all the wires and the aerials and the receivers,

just to pick up the signal for Chinese television.

Dominic was unconvinced by the story and called for back-up.

One of my colleagues discovered the older gentleman, who couldn't speak English,

was carrying £1,000 in cash. Again, this was quite odd

cos that's quite a large amount of cash.

When I asked the couple what this was all about,

they said it was a deposit for a premises they were trying to secure

as a restaurant. That didn't ring true either because £1,000,

whilst being a lot of money,

isn't enough to pay a deposit if you were buying a premises.

The three people were arrested on suspicion of fraud,

but as they were leaving the road, something strange happened.

As we neared the junction with Wimbledon Hill Road,

we saw another man, also of Chinese appearance.

He'd came round the corner from the main area of Wimbledon.

He stopped and looked at the van,

the people we had arrested in the van appeared to recognise him.

We decided to stop and talk to this gentleman as well.

One of my colleagues jumped out, spoke to the man,

he didn't speak a word of English.

Dominic believed the man

could also be involved in whatever kind of fraud was taking place.

He was also arrested, and Dominic set off for the police station

with a very puzzling case on his hands.

We now had four suspects in custody on their way back to the station.

Two could speak English, two couldn't.

We had a vehicle full of equipment that we didn't know its capabilities or what it was.

We had to get it all back to the station to examine it thoroughly

to get some technical advice so we could deduce the capabilities

of the equipment, and from that, further the investigation.

But we still didn't really know what it was capable of

and what they were actually doing.

The case was passed to Detective Sergeant Grant Donnachie

at Wimbledon CID, an expert in fraud.

The clock was ticking. He had only 24 hours to question the suspects,

but was confronted with the same strange evidence.

A car filled with sophisticated-looking surveillance equipment

and four Chinese suspects.

To make matters worse, as soon as they arrived at the police station,

the two English speakers didn't say a word.

They were calm and collected

until they came to the police station and at that point

they put the barriers up and did not interact or communicate with us.

Grant sent officers to the addresses of all the suspects.

At the address of the English speaking couple,

they found more quantities of cash

and more high-tech equipment including minute cameras.

There was logbooks, transaction books -

a lot of the material was in Chinese so we needed to get that later,

but at first glance you could tell

they were running a very successful business.

But just what that business was

and the purpose of the equipment remained a mystery.

We knew it was covert surveillance-type equipment

but we weren't 100% sure as to what and how it was being used.

Then Grant had a breakthrough.

One of the Chinese-speaking men, the one Dominic had spotted

coming round the corner, asked to be taken back

to Wimbledon High Street. He had a confession.

He had deposited clothing with surveillance-type equipment

in the changing rooms of a local shop.

The man explained he had been in radio contact with the couple in the car.

When they'd been caught and the signal went dead,

he'd panicked and bolted into a nearby clothes shop.

During a subsequent interview the full story finally emerged.

Wimbledon Library is a location for Life In The UK tests,

exams immigrants wishing to become UK citizens must pass.

For a price, Chinese fraudsters Steven Lee and Rong Yang

were helping people fake their exam papers and cheat the system.

They would provide that individual

with a small earpiece worn in their ear, not overt,

not obvious to the average member of the public.

At the same time, the customer was given a shirt.

An everyday shirt, but sewn into the lining and the button

was a camera which transmitted back to the computers and equipment

that they had in the car.

So the customer having been given the earpiece, the camera,

would go off and was able to sit in front of a computer screen,

was able to take a test by virtue of the camera capturing questions asked,

relaying back to them in the car,

from which they would then tell the answer into the earpiece.

Customer passes exam, monies are paid.

The result was fake British citizens.

Lee and Yang would advertise their services in local Chinese newspapers

and via word of mouth.

They charged £1,000 to help people pass the Life In The UK test,

which set them on the path to full UK citizenship.

With that comes access to all sorts of things

including the benefit system and the NHS.

Steven Lee and Rong Yang were jailed and forced to repay £100,000.

Had Dominic's team not had the call from the concerned passer-by, they

may never have discovered the fakers and their sophisticated crime.

Earlier, we saw how collector John Meers couldn't believe his luck

when he bought some cheap paintings by famous Indian artists online.

But an expert at an auction house spotted a number of strange things

about the pictures and alerted the police.

DC Michelle Roycroft of the Met Police's

Art and Antiques Unit began to investigate.

So these are the first three paintings

that Charlie Moore wasn't happy with.

All the paintings had labels on the back from galleries

and past exhibitions that seemed to authenticate them.

However, upon closer inspection, they also held a vital clue.

It was this particular Husain that when we examined,

the rear of the painting

was able to assist us in our investigation.

What we found was the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery stamp.

When we contacted Nicholas Treadwell,

he was able to tell us this wasn't in fact his gallery stamp.

Treadwell confirmed with Michelle

that his stamps always consisted of his complete address,

including the number of the building and the full postcode.

This was yet more evidence that the paintings were bogus.

Next, Michelle contacted those who had bought the pieces,

including John Meers up in Whitley Bay.

I didn't really begin to think there was a problem

until I received the email, and then the penny dropped.

John was soon faced with the awful reality

that all the paintings he'd bought were fake.

Having found out that potentially

all of them were fake, the response

was a feeling of dread, basically, because I knew that clearly

we had money we weren't entitled to

and it was very likely that someone would want it back, but of course

we'd actually spent a fair chunk of it.

To make matters worse, the remaining paintings which John

and his wife had fallen in love with had to be confiscated.

It was heartbreaking seeing them bagged up, the Barney,

the Husain, which was of a small white dove

in whites, which was beautiful.

From John and other customers like him,

Michelle took details of the online art vendors.

At first glance, they all appeared to be completely different people,

different names, and so we started our investigation with eBay.

It was then that we discovered that the eBay sellers were

all from one particular town in West Sussex, in Littlehampton.

Michelle contacted the local police

and was told that a year earlier, the sellers had a brush with

the law for selling a fake painting to a lady in Wales.

One of the group, William Mumford, had claimed that he had just

restored the painting and they were let off.

From years of investigating art fakers, Michelle knew

the so-called restorer could be key to unravelling the crime.

As soon as I read his interview

and he said he was a restorer of paintings, my experience immediately,

there were alarm bells ringing

and I knew this was probably going to be the artist.

Michelle was closing in on the artful dodgers.

They had painted themselves into a corner.

Our investigations led us

to a particular pub in Littlehampton where we discovered that

the majority of our suspects were all working. Billy Mumford,

he was the chef, there was a fellow chef Anthony Resse, there was one

of the cleaners, Martin Petrskovsky, and his wife Karen Potter.

Michelle organised a co-ordinated dawn swoop on four addresses.

But she focused on Mumford's flat.

It was a very small maisonette, immaculately kept,

but the rear bedroom had been turned into an artist's studio,

complete with easel, hundreds of books, all different artists,

paints, Victorian paints.

The books revealed how Mumford had been able to match

the signatures of each artist.

There was a particular book that specialised in signatures for

the Indian Progressive Art Group.

Particularly with Husain, as he got more elderly,

naturally his signature had changed

and Mumford was able to re-create the signatures,

almost through the ages.

Michelle also found all the tools Mumford used to create

the backs of the paintings, including a book of Victorian paper,

an old typewriter and numerous art gallery stamps.

This was one that he used quite a lot, the gallery one.

We were able to establish that the artist had exhibited at all

the galleries that he had made the stamps for.

So his research had been meticulous.

During his interview, the forger admitted just how prolific

he had been at churning out fakes.

Mr Mumford admitted to painting four or five paintings a week

for five years. So we were aware there were probably

over 1,000 paintings out in the art market.

This was a huge operation, almost a conveyor belt.

He also had in his garage stacks of paintings just waiting

for him to re-paint or add a signature to.

Mumford had carefully chosen his helpers for their different skills.

The cleaner at the pub was his IT man.

A fellow chef had proved a smart salesman, offloading

the pieces to auction houses.

He identified Anthony Resse as a very charming,

very personable young man, who was very good at taking the paintings

into the provincial auction houses, where he would come up with a story,

usually a sob story on every occasion.

When Michelle's team raided Resse's house, they discovered

a whiteboard charting his part in the fraud.

Here, he had listed all the auction houses that he had visited,

names of paintings he had taken into the auction houses,

the date of the intended sale, and how much the estimate

was going to be for that particular painting.

Forger William Mumford was jailed for two years.

Fellow chef Anthony Resse, and cleaner Petrskovsky,

also received jail sentences.

This was a very big case and it was a very satisfying conclusion

to see that it had been taken seriously.

During the court case, Mumford explained that he had tried

to make it as an artist in his own right and failed.

In his words, people weren't interested in the paintings,

they were just interested in who had signed it. So he thought

he'd give them what they wanted.

Mumford's victims stretched around the globe.

Hundreds of paintings are still thought to be out there.

Fortunately John Meers was able to reach an agreement with Bonhams

and he didn't have to pay back all the money.

However, the whole episode has been traumatic

and John has learned a lot from the experience.

Always spend only what you can afford to lose, basically.

If you lose the money, it doesn't actually make

a lot of difference to you financially. I think

that's the thing, set yourself limits and stick to them.

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

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd