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.

We also recount the multimillion pound international fraud

involving a powerful crime boss and dozens of fake companies.

The whole idea was basically to peddle lies to UK consumers

-just to get them to pay money.

-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.

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 hotspots 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.

Food fraud like this can have serious

repercussions for certain religious groups.

Jay Lakhani is director of the Hindu Academy.

For him and other Hindus, the cow is sacred and they never eat beef.

The Hindus would be very offended

if they found they were eating lamb curry, which actually had beef in it.

Just as an Englishman will not eat dog meat or even horse meat,

the Hindus will not eat cow's meat, beef.

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 miss-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 miss-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 essential to stop this suspected illegal seller.

He's no specialist, but he's thought to be selling powerful

illegal medicines from his front room.

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.

And we meet the man who took counterfeit slimming pills.

Took three years for my liver to recover.

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 skewiff,

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.

Coming up - HMRC investigators reveal

the massive fake vodka factory

here in the heart of one of the UK's busiest cities.

These people cared nothing for the damage they might do.

Getting yourself into serious debt must be one of the most

worrying situations you can encounter.

So imagine the relief when a company comes along

and says they can sort it out for you

and make that debt...disappear.

When these fakers come into your life, though,

you could end up with a debt problem that was worse than it was before.

Stuart Hughes has just finished the toughest case of his career.

Today, the Suffolk Trading Standards Officer

has come to Ipswich Crown Court to hear the judge pass sentence

on an extraordinary network of fakers.

The case involves dozens of fake companies,

money-laundering on an epic scale,

and a powerful crime boss based in Spain.

Originally, this case started on a very small scale.

There was a handful of complaints, very few to start off with.

These complaints centred on a number of different companies

offering a fake debt elimination service.

They gained access to lists of desperate, indebted people,

and called them offering a service

that promised to wipe away their debts.

This man was one of their targets.

Still coming to terms with the trauma,

he's asked to remain anonymous.

He'd been made redundant, was heavily in debt,

but thought he'd just been thrown a lifeline.

I got a phone call during the day,

and what they said was that the law had changed

so it meant that credit cards

that had been taken out before a certain date,

you could get some refunds on them.

The saleswoman sounded so convincing that the man paid

almost £1,000 to have his debt written off.

In reality, there'd been no change in the law

and the offer to clear the debt was fake.

I heard nothing for three or four weeks, so I contacted them

and they said they were very busy. I left it for another few weeks.

One day somebody picked the phone up

and said that they were no longer trading from those premises

and put the phone down, and that was the last I heard of them.

When I found out that it was a con,

it made me feel physically sick.

More and more targets contacted Suffolk Trading Standards.

Some had paid over £3,000 to have their debts wiped away,

but in each case the offer of financial assistance was fake

and simply a means to take their money.

One man's name, Mark Bell,

cropped up again and again in the complaints.

Stuart tracked down the bank accounts of the suspected fraudster.

We saw large amounts passing through the accounts,

we're talking millions and millions of pounds,

and we realised pretty quickly

that this was a much larger, more elaborate fraud.

Following these large sums as they flowed out of Bell's account

revealed a sophisticated money-laundering operation

involving multiple fake shell companies.

We just saw bank accounts that appeared to be purely

pumping money in and pumping money out.

It was typical of a money-laundering operation.

The money all flowed to one place -

into the account of a well-known British crime lord based in Spain.

All this money led eventually to a man called Antoni Muldoon.

Antoni Muldoon had been in Spain for around about 25 years.

He had a strong reputation as someone who would set up companies

that would be involved in frauds.

Stuart gathered as much evidence

against Muldoon's empire as possible,

collecting information from over 1,000 people.

The full scale of the fakers' operation soon became clear.

Muldoon ran four Spanish call centres

filled with British nationals who called people in the UK

pretending to be from different debt elimination companies.

The whole idea of these call centres was, basically,

to peddle lies to UK consumers just to get them to pay money.

It was time to take down the fakers.

We went into ten domestic and business premises across the UK

and several individuals were arrested and interviewed.

Amazingly, one of these people was a former policeman,

Christopher Taylor.

But the man at the centre of this massive fraud ring,

Toni Muldoon, remained at large in Spain.

Antoni Muldoon, we knew, was at the helm of this fraud,

and it was absolutely essential to make sure we got him back here.

After months of negotiations,

Spanish police swooped on the kingpin.

He'd been happily splashing cash he'd stolen

from thousands of people across the UK.

He lived in a luxury villa,

he had a ten-bedroom villa, which he'd purchased

from some of the money involved in this fraud.

He had a personalised gym, nice swimming pool,

speedboats, yachts, fast cars...

The fraud had netted Muldoon and his associates £5.7 million.

The gang was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud

and money-laundering at Ipswich Crown Court.

Today, Stuart's returned to the court

to see the gang receive their sentences.

The judge has passed sentence

on seven of the individuals involved in this fraud.

He's handed down significant sentences,

over 30 years for all the defendants.

Antoni Muldoon was sentenced to over seven years

for conspiracy to defraud.

We're really pleased with that outcome.

It's the conclusion, really, to three and a half years of very hard work.

-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 10 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.

As obesity grows in the UK,

people can look for an easy fix to control their weight,

but fakers can prey on desperate individuals online

by offering them an array of fake slimming products.

They promise to be legitimate, effective and, above all, safe.

These claims can be fake and the tablets can be very dangerous.

As David Campbell found out.

I was looking for that quick fix

to either help me lose weight

or help me, you know, cut my appetite.

When David spotted a branded sports supplement online

that promised to help him get in shape, he decided to buy it.

Something altogether different turned up,

and it was to cost him his health.

I bought a product which I thought

was a sports product to deaden appetite.

When the package arrived it was a plain white bottle.

The instructions in the box were completely foreign.

Online it was just, "Take two of these before each meal,

"your appetite will be completely suppressed."

Despite them being unbranded, David took the pills.

They made him seriously ill.

He's now convinced they were counterfeits,

not the branded product he'd ordered.

I collapsed, taken to hospital, given loads of blood tests...

Doctors told him what he'd taken included a large dose

of potentially dangerous steroids.

There were no steroids in the product advertised online.

A specialist actually said to me,

"If you don't stop taking these products you're buying online,

"you'll be dead within five years."

That really frightened me.

It took three years for my liver to recover.

Constantly in and out of hospital, blood tests,

I can't drink alcohol again, can't take painkillers any more

because my liver is that much more sensitive

because of that product that I bought online.

Back at the postal hub, 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.

This van is absolutely chock-a-block full of counterfeit, unlicensed,

fake, you-name-it medicines that are illegal.

This will all now be booked into the store,

then investigate where it was all going.

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.

Earlier, we saw how British backpacker Cheznye Emmons

died from methanol poisoning when she drank fake gin in Indonesia.

But Britain itself is awash with dangerous counterfeit booze.

Fake spirits are being manufactured in the heart of our cities

to be sold in shops across the country.

Adrian Farley is Assistant Director of Criminal Investigation for HMRC.

His team suspected they'd found a fake vodka bottling plant

when CCTV revealed tanks of liquid being unloaded from a truck

coming and going from an industrial estate.

They were about to discover one of the biggest fake booze operations

ever seen in Britain, all in the heart of Birmingham.

Intelligence led us to this set of premises,

where we believed there was some

illicit alcohol manufacturing taking place.

So we arrived here one morning with the Fire Brigade,

because we were most concerned about the risk of explosion.

The fumes from this manufacturing process can be such

that the chance of an explosion is very high.

A mobile phone or one of our radios could ignite the fumes.

When officers entered the premises, they couldn't believe their eyes.

There was enough bottle caps to do over 60,000 bottles.

There were 13 1,000-litre capacity bulk storage units.

This was a commercial operation

designed to flood the West Midlands area

with this highly-dangerous substance.

Like the Indonesian fakers,

the Birmingham gang had invented their own brand - Arctic Ice.

And, like the Indonesians, they were filling the bottles

with fake vodka, which was actually deadly methanol and water.

Methanol is used for cleaning, it's used in soaps,

it's used in printing inks and what-have-you.

It is not meant for human consumption.

This is something that was being produced simply to make people money

with a total disregard for the effect on public health.

The factory was located just yards

from other businesses and a busy road.

The idea of this being in a city environment like this

is really outrageous.

Had there been an explosion here, there would have been people killed.

These people cared nothing for the damage that they might do.

Adrian and his team shut down the plant immediately.

The men involved were arrested, convicted and sentenced.

But hundreds, maybe thousands of the bottles of fake vodka

had already been sold in shops throughout the area.

This man, Colin Gooch, bought two and drank them

over a period of weeks.

That's it, that's the shop I bought the fake vodka from.

Closed now. Closed since sentencing.

Undoubtedly, I wasn't the only person to purchase fake booze

from this particular establishment.

The shop was a franchise of the national retailer Bargain Booze.

Colin was alerted to the fact that the vodka was fake and dangerous

when he read a warning in the local newspaper.

He visited the doctor immediately, and was subjected to months

of tests on his eyes, liver and other organs.

You go to bed every night and close your eyes

and you look round the bedroom and think, "I might not see this again."

And it may sound dramatic, but it's not when you've been told

you could wake up blind the next morning.

Forensic analysis of the Arctic Ice showed dangerous levels of methanol.

But Colin hasn't yet shown any signs of poisoning.

However, he's concerned there may still be

bottles of Arctic Ice out there, and others may not be so lucky.

People are going into off-licences

and small independent traders tonight and they're buying stuff,

and do they know, can they put their hand on the heart and say,

"I know where this has come from, I can vouch for its authenticity

"and I know exactly what I'm drinking"?

Bargain Booze issued a statement...

But there are key things you can look out

for to avoid buying a dangerous bottle of fake spirits.

Cost is a key.

Generally these products undercut.

Not by a large amount, but enough to raise people's suspicions.

The labelling might not look right,

and also if it's a name that they've never heard of before.

If there are any concerns at all

they should either contact ourselves or Trading Standards.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.