Episode 1 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

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 the Fake Britain house and it's filled with fakes.

You may not know it, but your home could be too.

In this series, we'll be investigating the criminals trying

to get their hands on your cash by using fraud, forgeries and fakery.

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

Today, on Fake Britain, the tragic story of Cheznye Emmons,

the 23-year-old fatally poisoned by fake gin.

The gin was like no other gin that I've ever seen before.

It would kill anybody that drank it.

With exclusive footage filmed for Fake Britain,

we follow her father, as he turns investigator,

to track down more of the killer counterfeit booze

and warn other travellers of its dangers.

I'm gutted, really, because this could kill somebody else's

child and they're still selling it.

And what's really in your lamb curry?

We reveal the extraordinary level of food fakery across the UK.

After the horse meat incident,

I would expect all suppliers to be whiter than white at the minute.

This is obviously not the case.

This is the police. Could you open the door please?

And the crackdown on fake pharmaceuticals.

Suspected dangerous medicines being sold from a suburban house.

All of this stuff we'll have to send off to the lab to get analysed to see

what it actually contains.

It looks just like a bottle of gin, doesn't it?

Maybe not a brand you'd recognise and possibly a bit cheap

looking, but the sort of thing you could buy on holiday.

However, what's inside this bottle isn't gin at all.

It's a fake. And it's lethal.

And drinking this stuff had tragic consequences for one young woman

8,000 miles away from her home in Essex.

Cheznye Emmons was a bright,

bubbly 23-year-old beauty therapist from Southend.

She set off on what promised to be an unforgettable trip through

Asia with her boyfriend Joe.

She hadn't done anything like this before.

She'd really been looking forward to this.

She was going to look at the volcano and also the orang-utan sanctuary.

And she was saying that she was having a lovely time

and was really enjoying it and met lots of friends.

Cheznye was in the rainforest town of Bukit Lawang

in Indonesia, but then mum Pam received a phone call from

Cheznye's boyfriend, Joe, saying that Cheznye had become very sick.

She was in hospital, in intensive care.

I just thought that probably she'd been out drinking too much and

she hadn't felt well, so I wasn't initially too worried about it.

Cheznye had been drinking.

She, Joe and a friend had bought some cheap gin,

branded Mansion House, from the local shop to make some punch.

But all three had gone home sick and spent the next day vomiting.

From the bottle's design, it looked like a well-established brand,

but it wasn't and the gin inside was fake.

It was water mixed with the deadly solvent methanol,

a cheap alternative to alcohol and more commonly found in antifreeze.

They'd gone to sleep and when Cheznye woke up,

she said she couldn't see, she said that Joe was just like a shadow.

She couldn't make out any of his features

and so they decided that they'd get her in the car quick.

They was walking to the car, Cheznye actually collapsed.

Joe said the last thing she actually said to him was,

"I really want a cup of tea." She used to like her tea.

And he said that was it.

When she arrived in the hospital in Medan

and she got into the cubicle area and she went into a seizure.

Cheznye's condition deteriorated quickly.

Boyfriend Joe called her mum and dad again.

When he called the second time and said that she was in a coma,

that was really a shock. He said they'd said...

The only thing he could understand

was they'd said that she was brain dead.

And that's really when it sort of hit me how serious it actually was.

I was just sort of shocked. I just sort of went into...

Don't know, sort of like a dream state, I suppose.

I just let out a scream, going, "No, no, no!"

The family arranged to fly out to be by Cheznye's side.

They arrived in Indonesia and made straight for the hospital.

I've never seen anybody on a life-support machine before

and she just looked beautiful.

She looked brown, she was a beautiful kid,

and she had a lovely suntan, she looked gorgeous.

It was the weirdest,

strangest thing I think I've ever encountered in my life.

When people say comas,

you sort of imagine you can come out of comas, so we were sort of hoping

more along those lines that it would be something that she would

come out of.

But Cheznye's situation was much worse than they had imagined.

The fake gin had attacked her central nervous system, acidifying

the blood, restricting oxygen supply and causing major organ failure.

They showed us like a polygraph. It was completely flat, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Basically, her brain was dead. Her brain stem was dead.

And there was nothing else you could do.

You know, I tried to...

Sounds strange, but I tried to pinch her, I was shouting in her ear,

touching her eyes, to try and get some sort of movement, just anything,

just a flicker, just a twitch, and there was just nothing there.

It was just horrific. Nothing there at all.

The family was told that Cheznye wouldn't recover

and were faced with the prospect of turning off her life-support machine.

Although I was hoping,

I did feel that she wasn't going to be coming home.

There was no other choice, just do what we had to do, you know

what I mean.

The hardest thing that anyone or any parent could ever do, ever. Just...

Just didn't seem fair.

Coming up - with 100,000 Brits visiting Indonesia every year,

Brent Emmons travels back to the country to see

whether local shops are still selling the fake spirits.

This is Russian roulette.

They're potentially selling a bottle of poison to somebody.

This is a lamb curry. This is a beef curry.

Lamb. Beef. Got it? Simple, isn't it?

But as we've discovered,

some British curry houses are finding that distinction

rather hard to make and it's you and I, curry lovers, who are losing out.

From baltis to pasandas, dhansaks to tikka masalas,

curries are one of the nation's best loved dishes.

23 million Brits tuck into one every month.

But in the wake of the horse meat scandal,

how can we know what we're ordering is exactly what we're getting?

Lamb is one of the most expensive meats

and Trading Standards have raised concerns that some

restaurants are secretly substituting the tasty

chunks of lamb in their dishes for something a bit cheaper.

We decided to investigate for ourselves.

We hit two curry hot spots to find

out what's really in your lamb curry.

We began our masala-thon in Yorkshire.

We sent two researchers to Wakefield, Calderdale

and Bradford to buy five lamb curries.

Further south, they hit the streets of east London,

home to Brick Lane, southern England's curry mecca.

They picked up five more meaty feasts,

all supposed to contain lamb.

The curries were then bagged and tagged

and then it was time for testing.

Our curries were brought to Worcestershire Scientific Services.

The scientists here are food examination experts,

responsible for analysing thousands of meat

samples during the horse meat scandal.

Now it was time to find out

if there was something suspect in our takeaways.

First, the meat was separated from the vegetables

and the rest of the sauce.

Then, it was minced to make it easier to inspect.

The samples were mixed with various chemicals, heated into a kind

of soup and then inserted into a machine that separates the DNA.

Finally, the results are in.

How will our ten lamb curries do?

The samples were described as lamb curries,

but we've actually seen that three of them contained beef only.

-There is no lamb in them.

-It's official.

The multiple strands of DNA reveal three out of the ten are fake

lamb curries. The restaurants have used meat which is a lot cheaper.

And Paul is shocked by the results.

To have three samples out of ten that contain beef only

when they're described as a lamb curry is surprising.

That is a high proportion of substitution.

After the horse meat incident

and all the focus that went onto the food chain,

particularly the meat supply within the food chain,

you would expect all suppliers to be whiter than white at the minute.

This is obviously not the case.

Award-winning curry chef Cyrus Todiwala OBE is

outraged by the results of our tests.

It is morally wrong.

Makes me feel rather sad that it is some of my fellow

restaurateurs who could have done that.

Whichever shape or form you look at it, it's wrong. It is cheating.

Cyrus explained how he believes the curry fakers are getting away

with duping customers.

Lamb has distinct flavour profile, but if I cut it really small

and I mix it up and I cook with it, it would be very difficult, unless

you're a real professional, to find out that it's beef and not lamb.

An average person dining in a restaurant would not know

the difference.

We passed the results of our survey to Trading Standards.

Amazingly, their own tests across the UK also

reveal about a third of lamb curries contains beef.

That suggests millions of people are being mis-sold lamb curries

every year.

Karin Lowe is joint head of the food fraud investigation team.

If a consumer's asked for a lamb curry,

they should receive a lamb curry.

Food fraud does seem to occur more often in an economic downturn,

but that doesn't make it right.

It's still a criminal offence, at the end of the day,

to mis-describe food and businesses can face penalties of up

to £20,000 fine or two years in prison.

-Cyrus Todiwala has a message for the fakers.

-Please don't do it.

Please announce it. Please tell the people that I am not cooking lamb

because I can't afford it, or whatever reason I have got.

Why don't you try beef curry instead of lamb curry? People trust you.

You cannot break that trust, you cannot break that respect.

Not surprisingly, since we're in the Fake Britain house,

all of these pharmaceutical products are fakes.

We've looked at bogus medicines before on Fake Britain

and they're still flooding into the country.

We don't know what's in them, we don't know where they were made,

or the conditions they were made in.

What we do know is that they're on sale right now online.

We've been following the teams whose job it is to protect us

from this kind of fakery.

Danny Lee-Frost, head of enforcement for medical watchdog the MHRA,

is engaged in an ongoing battle against fake medicine traders.

This morning, he's on his way to raid the house of a Midlands

man believed to be receiving shipments from China,

part of an operation targeting fake and unlicensed health products.

We are visiting an address that is connected with the sale

online of unlicensed hair loss products.

The internet advertises creams,

pills and other products that promise to reverse hair loss.

The MHRA's branded almost all as fake.

With the team in position, it's time to go in.

Test purchases reveal the products contain three times the legal

limit of the active ingredient minoxidil.

This could be extremely dangerous, especially if used by pregnant

women, but sold online, the trade is completely unregulated.

KNOCKS ON DOOR

It's the police. Could you open the door, please?

Officers enter together with police.

They secure the suspects and begin hunting for dodgy hair loss

products and anything connected with their sale.

It's being sold by someone from a residential address to

basically anyone with a credit card.

That makes it very unsafe for anybody to buy it, to use it,

without any qualified instructions at all.

It's not long before the team finds what it's been looking for.

We've got quite a lot of stuff here.

We've got the stuff we were looking for, which is

the hair loss treatment.

We've also got medicated versions of the shampoo.

Again, that's illegal.

All of this stuff, we'll have to send off to the lab to get analysed to see

what it actually contains and what the actual strength of this stuff is.

The man will be interviewed at a later stage.

An offence like this is very serious.

The specific offences we're looking at today have a maximum

penalty of two years' imprisonment and or an unlimited fine.

Later, Danny and his team visit a Midlands postal hub to

intercept parcels stuffed full of fake drugs.

This is a serious, serious health risk.

Earlier in our exclusive fake alcohol report, parents Brent

and Pam Emmons described their horror as they discovered

their daughter Cheznye had been fatally poisoned by fake gin

in a popular backpacker town in Indonesia.

Basically, her brain was dead and there was nothing else you could do.

It just didn't seem fair.

In the wake of the tragedy,

dad Brent has decided to return to the country.

Three months after his daughter's death, he's travelling 8,000 miles

to ensure police are doing everything they can to stop the sale

of killer fake gin Mansion House to even more British travellers.

In fact, there's no such thing as genuine Mansion House gin.

What's on sale is a deadly mix of water

and the chemical methanol, more commonly used in antifreeze.

For Brent, this is bound to be an emotionally difficult trip,

but he's determined to ensure that other travellers will be safe.

I've now got a four-hour journey to Bukit Lawang

where we've got to find the gin that poisoned my daughter.

With the help of locals who met Cheznye, Brent tracks

down the very shop which sold the fake booze that killed his daughter.

This is the shop that they bought the gin from.

I'm going to see what they've got for sale there now.

Brent's been assured by the police that the area is no longer

selling the stuff, but within seconds of buying some beers,

he's offered more lethal spirits - now being stored out the back.

When the shopkeeper's son realises they're being filmed,

the transaction stops.

Brent now visits another local shop.

This time, the woman sells him the same fake gin that Cheznye drank,

Mansion House, proving that the lethal drink is still

openly on sale to tourists and locals.

It's exactly the same bottle that Cheznye and Joe bought

and it works out about £3.20, which is nothing.

I'm gutted really because I thought that they'd stopped selling it

around here completely, but obviously not.

Potentially, this could kill somebody,

kill somebody else's child, and they're still selling it.

Back home, Brent reflects on just what he found in Indonesia.

I felt like going down and burning the bloody shop down myself,

but obviously you're not going to do that

because we want it done in the right way.

But how these shops are still selling it... And they...

The heartbreaking thing is they know that this is Russian roulette.

They're potentially selling a bottle of poison to somebody.

At a quick glance,

the quality of the bottle would suggest that it's safe.

If you really do look at it, you can tell the label's a bit skewwhiff,

the hologram is not a very good one, and if you look at it carefully,

there's a few bits and pieces floating about.

But the scary thing is the top is very good, it's very well done,

and you're a traveller on holiday,

you're not going to study this bottle, are you?

We sent the gin to be analysed at a test lab.

Scientists were looking for the presence of methanol,

a cheap substitute for the ethanol found in normal alcoholic drinks.

Not only was the gin fake, the levels were off the chart.

The gin was like no other gin that I've ever seen before.

It was only 4% alcohol, but the real problem was the methanol.

It was almost 25% methanol by volume.

Methanol is very poisonous.

The legal limit for methanol in gin is 10 grams

per 100 litres of alcohol.

We found 441,000 grams per 100 litres of alcohol.

So you can see, it's 44,000 times the limit.

That is most certainly not safe.

It's unlikely fake gin this dangerous has ever been

seen in Britain before.

It could have horrific consequences for anyone drinking even

the smallest amount.

If you drank one shot of this particular gin, it would

quite possibly make you blind.

It would certainly have a very severe effect on your eyesight.

Depending on the person, because it is very variable,

two doubles may kill you.

You would definitely be killed by a large amount of this,

say half of this bottle.

I've never seen a gin with anywhere near as much methanol as this.

It is definitely a shocking result.

It's not a good idea that it's being sold to anybody.

It would kill anybody that drank it.

Whilst Brent was in Indonesia,

local police tracked down the source of the fake gin.

They discovered an industrial operation.

They closed down a warehouse that had

over 5,000 bottles of fake alcohol in.

They had arrested workers

and the main man that owned the distillery was on the run.

The illicit plant was flooding the popular tourist region,

churning out fake whisky and vodka, as well as gin.

They found a list containing the places that they distributed

the fake spirits to

and they listed shops, bars, clubs.

So, you're not safe anywhere, really.

As well as Cheznye, backpackers from Australia, Sweden

and Ireland have all died from drinking fake alcohol in Indonesia.

In 2009, 25 people were poisoned by methanol in Bali alone.

Brent and Pam Emmons are desperate for more awareness amongst

British travellers about the perils of fake alcohol,

particularly young backpackers visiting South East Asia.

Our family and friends have started a campaign.

It's called Chez Safe A Life Campaign. You can get it on Facebook.

We're lobbying the Government at the moment to try

and get leaflets given out when the doctors give you inoculations

when you go to these countries.

If you know somebody that is going to these countries,

or even surrounding countries, Thailand, Bali, all these

other places, just say, "I've seen this programme," make them aware.

If you think that the bottle doesn't look right,

doesn't smell quite right,

don't chance it.

Don't chance it, because it is one single drink, and that can kill you.

-KNOCKING

-It's the police.

Earlier, we saw the MHRA raid the house of a man

suspected of selling dangerous hair loss products.

This morning, head of enforcement Danny Lee-Frost and his team

are at a postal hub in the Midlands.

They've teamed up with the Border Force to intercept packages

entering the UK which are suspected to contain dangerous fake medicines.

They're concerned some of these counterfeit drugs

may be getting into pharmacies.

What we're looking at here is a parcel

that's come off a flight from Hong Kong.

It's a suspicious parcel, it rattles,

there's an indication there's possibly blisters of tablets inside,

so we're going to open it up and have a look.

Oh, yes.

What we have got here are blisters of tablets,

clones of genuine Viagra.

Counterfeit erectile dysfunction drugs

are a massive problem for the MHRA.

Danny finds Cialis and two kinds of counterfeit Viagra.

Despite the convincing branding,

there's no way of knowing what's inside these drugs.

This is a serious, serious health risk to anybody who takes it.

But there is a big incentive to deal in counterfeit medicines.

The trade is making the fakers millions.

There's a hell of a lot of tablets in this box.

The box itself weighs ten kilos,

so we're looking at about 10,000 blisters in there.

That's probably got a street value of anything between £50-£70,000.

Counterfeit medical tablets have previously been found

to contain anything from amphetamines to brick dust.

Our overriding concern is could these products

end up on a chemist shop shelf somewhere in the UK?

Could somebody go along with a prescription from their doctor

and end up with one of these?

The suspect meds are tested on hi-tech machines

bought with money seized in previous raids.

All the medicines are fake.

Then Danny discovers another dangerous product.

This one is marketed for weight loss, but it's extremely unsafe.

We have had these analysed.

They do contain the active ingredient sibutramine.

Products containing sibutramine were withdrawn in 2010

after it emerged that the chemical can cause heart attacks.

Anyone buying this thinking they're getting

a legitimate product will be mistaken.

It's illegal and dangerous.

These shouldn't be sold. They claim they have natural plant ingredients.

Actually it's got a very powerful pharmaceutical ingredient in there,

but nobody who takes it would actually know it's there.

The dangerous slimming product

Danny has seized is loaded into a van,

together with dozens of fake medicines.

They're transported to the NHRA's secret storehouse.

The contents of the van are brought inside.

Amazingly, this is just one day's seizure of counterfeit

and unlicensed medicines from one of the UK's many postal hubs.

Danny's message is clear.

It's dangerous for people to buy their medicines online.

You should only be buying them from reputable sources

and, ideally, they should be going to see their doctor in the first place.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.