Episode 8 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Get down! Get down!

-Get on the floor now!

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...

..danger on our roads, the fake car insurance putting us all at risk...

And he had hoodwinked over 500 different victims,

all paying thousands of pounds direct to his bank accounts,

for car insurance that were fake.

..the fake police who brought terror into people's homes...

Shocking. It was just the worst moment of my life.

I still get flashbacks.

They thought at that moment in time, they were both, you know,

going to end up dead.

..and the man faking homelessness.

Police say his begging was making him more than £50,000 a year...

while living in one of the most expensive areas in London.

The majority of our beggars are conning the public.

If you drive a motor vehicle on public roads, you need insurance.

It's that simple.

If you drive around without it, not only are you committing a crime,

but you're a liability to everyone else. So, you do what we all do.

You get a quote, you pay your money over,

and then, a little bit later, a certificate arrives in the post.

Yeah, except, as we've discovered,

the fakers are now also targeting the motor insurance industry.

(It's a fake!)

The key to being a good driver is not taking risks.

But fake insurance means you might be facing

a danger on the roads without even realising it.

It's called ghost broking. Criminals sell fake car insurance online.

It often appears to be genuine, and at a good price,

but the policy isn't underwritten.

It's worthless, and means victims can think they're insured

when they're not.

DCI Dave Wood is the head of the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department

based at the City of London Police

and runs a team investigating just this kind of fraud.

They are technically driving without insurance,

which leads to all sorts of repercussions.

You can be prosecuted at court should you be involved in an accident

with another member of the public, another vehicle or pedestrian,

then you will be liable for those damages without any cover.

Nick Whitaker's family found out all about ghost broking...

the hard way.

I was looking for some car insurance for my son who's 17,

just passed his test, looking for some competitive car insurance

in this day and age where it's very expensive.

After trawling through the internet,

Nick came across the Aston Midshires website,

not to be confused with any other company of a very similar name.

It looked highly professional and he decided to call them for a quote.

I telephoned him myself,

I gave him the car registration plate details,

he then told me exactly what the car was,

what the size of the car was,

what the colour of the car was and everything.

He knew everything about the car.

We got a fully comprehensive quote and I thought,

"Well, he's probably saved about £600."

Nick's son handed over a deposit.

They received these documents and he was satisfied he'd got a good deal.

If you'd seen the documentation that these guys sent out

was as plausible as any documentation that I've ever had in 30 years.

There was a certificate of motor insurance, there was

a cover note, they had the watermark through all the paperwork.

Pleased with the professional approach

of Aston Midshires, Nick was only too happy to recommend them.

Hearing about the good deal he'd got,

one of his son's friends asked Nick to help him get a quote too.

But this time, when Nick tried ringing the broker,

the company that he'd thought was so professional first time round,

was a lot more elusive.

After trying them for probably three or four hours, I then became a bit

suspicious really on whether or not the insurance company was genuine.

So, I rang the local police to find out whether they could just check

whether my son's car was insured.

It turned out that the documents were all fake.

They weren't worth the paper they were written on.

Nick had fallen prey to a sophisticated conman

and it had cost his family nearly £2,000.

I feel sick and angry, to be fair.

I feel sick at the fact that my son could have killed somebody

and his car insurance wouldn't have been valid.

What would we have done then?

I feel angry that these guys are getting away with

what they get away with.

Nick wasn't the only victim.

Hundreds of others were being taken in.

The police started to investigate.

Uniformed police officers were stopping vehicles

driven by young motorists who didn't have insurance.

The young motorist, when in conversation with the police officer,

would explain, "Yes, I have insurance." Sometimes, they may

have had an actual copy of the fake certificate on them.

With motorists being tricked,

police were keen to stop any more cash being handed over.

They took the Aston Midshires site down.

Who was the mystery man,

the shadowy ghost broker?

Police were starting to build up a picture.

This guy was very much au fait with the internet, his website

and operation was of the highest order,

and he paid extra premium so when you did a search for, say,

cheap car insurance, his site would be one of the first

that you came across.

It looked bona fide and you would never be suspicious of it.

After months of investigative work, police uncovered this man,

Danyal Buckharee, as the face behind the fraud.

He was one of the biggest ghost brokers in the UK.

Police decided to raid Buckharee's flat.

Which was, in effect, his operating centre,

and this was an office with various laptops, various mobile phones,

lots of paper with numbers on,

fake certificates...he had a wall chart on with his sales team,

his marketing team, his compliance manager, all details which were fake.

The flat was his office and the nerve centre of his operation.

But how had Buckharee managed to convince victims that he was

running a real insurance company?

I tended to speak to them four or five times

on the telephone before we even transferred any money to them.

There was always office noise in the background,

like a proper insurance office, so they were very, very convincing.

And there was a reason why the office sounded so genuine.

He had a sound system there that was wired up to replicate

the noises in a call centre.

So, you'd be sitting there talking to Mr Buckharee about

your car insurance policy, which was fake,

and you would hear other people talking in the background,

you would hear phones going and fax machines whirring.

This was all part of his scam.

He would actually be in the flat on his own.

OFFICE NOISES PLAY

You're listening to the actual recording that Buckharee

played to his targets.

CHATTERING AND PHONES RINGING

From his small riverside flat, Buckharee had created the illusion

of a busy insurance office, and, while on the raid,

police discovered evidence of 40 more targets.

People insured with First Car Direct Insurance,

another of his fake companies, and shouldn't be confused with

any other companies of the same or similar names.

We contacted all of those drivers that were actually,

some of them, on the road when we phoned them

in possession of these fake policies, but none the wiser till

they received that phone call from one of my detectives.

Buckharee was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud.

He had hoodwinked over 500 different victims.

He'd set up, over time, four different websites,

each of which had attracted numerous victims,

all paying thousands of pounds direct to his bank accounts for car

insurance policies and certificates that were fake.

I would have him as one of the top-level fraudsters,

certainly the best one that we've encountered so far,

and I say 'best' in inverted commas.

City of London Police are cracking down on car insurance fraud,

with a number of early morning raids.

Last year, they made nearly 50 arrests for ghost broking.

Simon Douglas investigates fake insurance,

and says that ghost broking is a fraud that's on the rise.

We've definitely seen an increase in ghost broking,

it's a very lucrative crime.

The scams were are extremely good, the offers look convincing,

and people have got no reason to disbelieve that they aren't

dealing with a perfectly proper trained advisor.

So, it is very hard for people to avoid ghost broking, they do

need to be very careful.

If they see an offer that looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Many of us just walk on by, some spare a little change,

and there are those who do a lot more and are really generous.

We all have different reactions to beggars on the street.

Most of us agree, though, that if someone is genuinely homeless,

through no fault of their own, then they need and deserve our help.

And that makes it all the more frustrating to know that there

are some beggars who are faking it,

and a tiny minority who have turned it into a lucrative business.

Begging is illegal in Britain, but we all know it goes on.

And although many of us don't mind giving cash,

police say it's encouraging people onto the streets.

They say many of the people collecting it aren't really

genuinely homeless or in need,

and are simply preying on the public's kindness.

This is Lincoln, where police say fake begging

has become something of an industry.

They run an operation to tackle persistent

and aggressive begging in the city centre.

The first perception is that

if somebody sees somebody sat on the ground looking for small change,

that that person is destitute, has no other means of support,

needs that to survive.

When they went to tackle begging,

they uncovered another fraud taking place, widespread fakery with lots

of people pretending to be hungry and homeless when they aren't.

Some of our beggars are actually on benefits, have homes,

and actually are making £50 a day just from the begging activities.

Well, if you extrapolate that out, that's a lot of money over a year.

In fact, it's more than you could earn

working nine to five on the minimum wage.

'Inspector Mark Garthwaite is determined not to allow

'the public to be conned.

'Here, he's briefing his officers before a patrol.'

And in front of him are pictures of the city's most persistent beggars.

So, this is probably our most prolific, yes,

so he's the one that you're probably going to come across most today.

He got aggressive with people and has a well-established house,

absolutely no reason for him to be begging whatsoever.

In fact, five out of the six people in these mug shots are faking it.

Although they might appear homeless when out begging,

they all have addresses and some are on benefits.

With the briefing over, officers head off into the city.

And it's not long before they come across one of the men on their list.

Down at the waterfront, they spot one of their six most

prolific offenders sitting in a popular begging location.

He's got a home and is well-known for begging in the city centre.

If you sit there, it may appear that you're begging, which is

a criminal offence.

The police move him on with a warning not to come back.

They have found fake beggars come up with a range of excuses.

'When we do brief the staff, we say, you know, talk to these people,

'why are they sat on a blanket on the ground in an underpass when there'

are fantastic numbers of benches and seating available in the city centre?

So, to be sat on the ground on a blanket is clearly placing

themselves in a position where they can get money off people.

Another team has spotted this man.

A well-known street beggar, he's sitting in a spot that police

know people often use for begging, and he's attracted some passers-by.

OK...

While the woman heads off to fetch him a cuppa,

the officers move in for a chat.

Isn't it? Yes, I don't believe you're begging at the moment, but

I do know you've had history of that round here,

you've been spoken to about it.

Right.

OK...

if what you're telling me is the case, and these ladies are offering

just to get you a cup of tea, I have no issue with that whatsoever.

You know the drill as well as I do. Oh, sorry, my love.

Yeah, so, if we come back in...

an hour's time or so, you're still here,

it will be a different situation.

OK? All right, you're very welcome. Thank you.

Despite his rucksack, some cardboard and a dog,

the man admits he's currently housed.

It's a softly, softly approach this time.

If this gentleman does have a home address, there is

a possibility that he is begging alongside claiming benefits

and, on this occasion,

we felt that it was a more appropriate action to

request that he move on,

rather than take a more official response of ticketing or fining him.

We have beggars who are genuinely homeless

and who will actually say thank you for a cup of coffee or

a slice of cake or a sausage roll,

or whatever people want to give them, you know, so they are making

nothing, they are simply going hand to mouth, and we accept that.

They are the people we will target most with the support and the help.

The people that have made over £50 a day in cash and have benefits

and are in housing, well, you know,

you're talking about quite a good wage there.

That's a lot more money than some people are making

who are working hard for it and, actually, are probably some

of the people that are giving money to these people in the first place.

Lincoln is a popular place for tourists.

Police say in the past

it's attracted professional beggars from far and wide,

but that the operation has successfully brought numbers down,

despite the use of some clever tactics.

We've got regulars who know that we're out there,

who know where the CCTV cameras are,

so they know if they sit in certain positions, we don't see them

unless we literally come across them ourselves.

They say patrols like this are vital and usually turn up results.

Today is no different.

-Hello there.

-This man is a persistent offender.

What's your name?

He's been banned from sitting on the ground anywhere in Lincoln.

He has an address and is well known to police.

-Are you moving on now?

-Yeah.

OK, so, you know you shouldn't be here?

Well, you do know you can't be in the centre of town,

so consider this as a warning for doing this.

'This is our most prolific beggar.'

He will walk away when our officers approach,

he will sit in areas not very well covered by CCTV

because he knows we're less likely to be able to prove things,

'so he is very, very sharp around the legislation knowing what we can do.'

Do you have an address?

Yeah, I've been staying at 35...

After giving police his address, they let him move on.

OK, well, consider this a warning. If we see you again,

we'll have to move you, we'll have to do something...

'He has been offered help by various charities'

and has thrown it back in their face.

He refuses the help, he refuses to change his lifestyle, because

he is making a substantial amount of money from this, thank you very much.

Rick Henderson runs Homeless Link,

a charity that helps the genuinely needy.

They've conducted research into fake begging.

The public, when they're faced with seeing somebody

begging in the streets, make the assumption that they are genuinely

homeless, but our research shows that this is often not the case.

Of people with experience of homelessness,

eight in ten admit to sleeping rough,

but only three in ten admit to begging, so there isn't really

a direct link that we can find between homelessness and begging.

Rick says members of the public wanting to help the homeless

should think carefully about how they give.

We think it's a matter of personal conscience

whether or not people give their money to beggars in the street.

It's very difficult sometimes to walk past somebody in the street who

clearly seems to be in need.

What we think is important is that people understand the facts

It's certainly not the case that all beggars are homeless,

it's often the case, in fact,

that people are begging in order to get money for drugs or alcohol,

and we think that there are alternatives that people could

choose instead of giving money to beggars.

For example, they could buy copies of the Big Issue,

they could donate their money or time to local homelessness charities.

So, giving to beggars, although it's a personal choice,

is not the only option.

CONVERSATION INDISTINCT

I can see you packing up. Does that mean you're moving on?

'None of the people we filmed begging

'wanted to be interviewed on camera.

'Now, this is just one city, but police here say public perception

'is different from the reality they're seeing,

'and they want the public to be on their guard for fake beggars.'

We are seeing over 50% of the people that we are dealing with for begging,

have houses, are on some sort of benefits,

and don't need this way of life, they are simply feeding habits

using money from the public and they are being preyed on.

This is in any way, shape or form, a fraud.

The majority of our beggars are conning the public.

Later on, we'll see the extraordinary story

of a beggar making more than £50,000 a year by pretending

to be homeless, while, all the time,

living in one of the most expensive areas of London.

When bad things happen, you want to be able to rely on the police.

It's the badge and uniform you should be able to trust,

but, as our next story shows, not even the boys and girls in blue

are off limits to the fakers.

Detective Sergeant John Andrew is on his way to court to see

fakers that he's brought to justice sentenced.

But it's how they went about their

violent crime spree that's disturbing.

Our offenders were dressed as police officers,

they had body armour, handcuffs,

police identification...it's very serious.

It's one of the biggest cases of its kind.

The criminals in this van are violent, serious and organised.

Their fakery involved hostage-taking,

car chases, and robberies that left their victims terrified.

It was the scariest thing we've ever gone through.

It was shocking, we couldn't get to sleep for months.

They thought, at that moment in time, they were both, you know,

going to end up dead.

The police in Manchester had a problem.

The public was being taken in by fakers,

fakers who were pretending to be police in order to

con their way into people's homes,

and the criminals were meticulous in their attention to detail.

The talk that they used, they used a lot of police jargon,

they produced what looked like fake police documents,

and I just think that their argument was very, very convincing that

they were, you know, genuine police officers,

to the point people trusted them.

The gang's method was simple and brazen.

-HE KNOCKS ON DOOR

-They would turn up on

people's doorsteps, often in broad daylight...

My name's DC Croft.

..using fake police ID to create a false sense of security.

Mohammed, not his real name, is too terrified to appear.

He says he'll never forget the day he was robbed by the fake policemen.

Men just walk in and say,

"Police." They were wearing the full gear and they come in

and they said, "We got a warrant to search your place for drugs.

"We have the cocaine, heroin..."

I said, "What?!" I laughed and I said, "You having a laugh?"

They said, "No, we're serious."

I said, "Are you sure you've got the right house?" They go, "Yeah."

I had my mum and my sister there, but my sister was pregnant.

My mum just was quiet and just slowly just...

she fainted.

But the men weren't there to investigate drug use.

They were there to steal whatever they could.

I challenged them and I said, "If you're police...

"show me your ID.

"Show me your warrant."

He said, "I'll show you it." I said, "No, I want to see it now."

That's when he panicked a bit, I think,

and he hit me in my face and I dropped and he handcuffed me

and he handcuffed my brother, and he showed me an ID and he goes,

"There, you happy? There's my ID. You happy?"

And you should have seen the ID, it was a police officer's ID...

but with his picture on it.

The ID he'd used to reassure them was fake.

The gang had copied police identification

and put their own photos on them.

They'd also got access to a badge and a warrant card

lost by policemen from a different force some months earlier.

Flashing their fake ID convinced the family they were genuine.

They were kept downstairs

while some of the fake police officers ransacked the bedrooms.

The thieves then turned their attention to the family car.

They come back and they say, "Give us the Audi key,

"we want to search the Audi. "Give us the keys."

And they then turned round and said, "Look, we didn't find anything,

"so the Dog Unit's coming."

The fake policemen removed the handcuffs

and told the family to wait indoors.

The next minute you hear...

the Audi just start up and...

just reverse out of the corner...

and go.

The family then realised that the police officers

were, in fact, criminals.

I went and seen the state upstairs and I said,

"Mum, we've just been robbed."

It was just shocking, shocking...

what you go through. It was just the worst moment of my life...

basically. Nightmares...I still get flashbacks.

But Mohammed wasn't the only victim.

The gang was striking in other places as well,

and they were becoming increasingly violent.

In the first few occasions where they'd gone into an address,

although they used the force to put the restraints on,

they were generally...uh, would sort of reassure the occupants,

then go and search the address.

We then sort of noticed that

things had become a little bit more sinister.

The group started to kidnap people.

They took one man to what he thought was an unmarked police car

and drove him to a flat that they'd rented.

He was taken inside the address

and it was only at that point that two masked men

burst their way into the address and said, "You're being robbed."

He, genuinely thinking he was still with the police officers, jumped up

and went to a police officer, looking for support and help,

at which point, that officer turned round to him and said,

"No, you are being robbed."

And it was at that point then that he realised that the whole thing

had been a ruse and he was in dreadful trouble.

Over the next hours, the victim was repeatedly beaten up,

choked unconscious and threatened that his torture would get worse

if he didn't hand over more money.

With the violence escalating,

the police had to find out who the fakers were and quickly.

The breakthrough came when Salford CID began sharing

its intelligence with Roy Story and his officers down the road.

'Here at the Manchester Police HQ, Roy had been looking to

'robberies in the Greater Manchester area,

'and already had some information on possible suspects.'

We had a spike in the number of offences being committed.

We started investigating a team from the area of Salford who were

committing robberies of cash couriers

when they were making deliveries to banks.

Roy and his team had this house under surveillance.

Later, we'll see how it led them to the fake police gang

and ended their violent crime spree.

SIRENS WAIL

Earlier, we saw how police in Lincoln are trying to stop

fake beggars conning the public out of cash

by pretending to be homeless.

They found some evidence that,

although someone might look hard-up...

that's not always the case.

In London, it appears fake begging has been taken to

an astonishing level.

This is Simon Wright.

Police say he was making over £50,000 a year

and living in a flat in an expensive area.

Oliver Strebel is a Metropolitan police officer.

He works in Wandsworth and Wright was begging in his patch.

He did appear to members of the public to be homeless.

He had a rucksack and a blanket and his dog and he would be sitting

on the ground, and he'd have a sign saying,

"Please give me money, I have nowhere to live."

But, in reality, it was all a con.

Wright was making significant sums of money through begging

while living in a flat and claiming benefits.

Simon Wright was making between £200 and £300 a day.

In change, mainly, but also notes as I saw myself when moving him on.

I've seen £5, £10, and even a £20 note given to him.

Police believe Wright was making more than £50,000 a year, tax-free,

begging in Putney.

But his success was attracting others.

We actually went through a phase of having

anything up to ten beggars a day in the high street, drunk,

shouting and screaming, abusing members of the public,

kicking rubbish across streets, dropping litter,

staggering around and intimidating people,

families, women with children...

But it wasn't just on the street that this fake beggar was

causing trouble.

Despite pretending to be homeless,

Wright was actually living in Fulham...

one of London's most upmarket and desirable areas...

in a flat worth £350,000.

And even though the State was paying his rent and supporting him, he was

using the money he got from begging to help enjoy all-night parties.

It certainly seemed as though Wright was getting away with it,

but local people who'd given him money,

started realising what he was up to and they contacted the police.

We had a lot of calls from the public.

There were websites where people were blogging,

talking about the fact that here was this man

and he has somewhere to live, it was public information.

Pressure was growing for the police to do something.

Wright was lying to people about not having a home, in fact,

he carried a sign that said as much.

It gave Oliver a chance to take him to court for his fakery.

At court, he was convicted for fraud by false representation

and for begging. He had pleaded guilty to it as a no contest.

I think he assumed that it would just be another usual small fine

and then he'd be out the door again.

But the conviction meant that Oliver was able to secure an ASBO for

Wright banning him from begging in Putney or anywhere else in London.

I was very pleased because it moved Simon Wright out of the area

and it dealt with one of our key concerns, which was antisocial

behaviour in the area, by getting rid of Simon Wright and his hangers-on.

However, since then, Wright has breached his ASBO,

begging in the capital on a number of occasions.

Simon Wright may be a one-off, an extreme,

but he does prove the point.

If you really want to help out a homeless person,

you might be better off giving your money to one of

the many charities that support them.

Where there is muck, some people say...

there is brass.

Well, this much is for certain,

there is a lot of money to be made by disposing of our waste.

It's expensive and there are all sorts of rules

and regulations about what you dump where.

Of course, where there is big money involved, inevitably,

the fakers will want a piece of it, even if

it means dumping thousands of tons of dangerous waste

into one of the most beautiful areas of the country...

a landfill site which is completely fake.

Wales is a land of mountains and valleys, rivers and streams,

so you would think that the water quality here would be quite

good, but today they're having to do a test to see if it's polluted.

It's something they might have to do for quite some time,

and it's all down to the irresponsible actions of a

faker who affected the people living here in Tredegar in South Wales.

The people in this small town were worried about an overwhelming smell.

Where was it coming from?

Nobody around here seems to know what it was, what the smell was,

where it was coming from.

Stewart Brown and his sons had smelt a rat.

My boys used to walk around the mountain

and they was always on about the smell up there,

and, like, brown liquid running down the mountain.

It smelt like raw sewage. Not very nice for the people about here.

You don't really want that on your doorstep.

And they weren't the only ones concerned.

Catriona Harvey works for Natural Resources Wales.

It's her job to protect a countryside that she says is

increasingly under attack from fakers.

We had a report via our incident hotline of illegal tipping

taking place at this site.

But when Catriona arrived, what she uncovered shocked her.

At a location which was supposed to be a beautiful stretch

of quiet countryside, she found a massive working landfill...

piles of rubbish everywhere filling up a disused reservoir.

The land above the town had been turned into a dumping ground.

They were smelling the stench of rotting rubbish.

It was fake, it was unlicensed, it was illegal.

It was very clear that the site had brought in shredded waste,

mixed waste, which was paper, cardboard, wood,

bits of blue plastic and bits of food waste,

which very clearly shouldn't have been there.

The rubbish was polluting the local environment

and causing a nasty fluid called leachate to seep out of the ground.

It was leaving the site in quite a high volume

and the quality was shockingly poor, it was equivalent to raw sewage.

The River Sirhowy is in close proximity.

If the pollutant had gotten in, in strong enough concentrations,

we could easily have lost the local fish population.

Catriona and her colleagues slowly started to work out exactly

what was going on.

Paul Morris, a local farmer, had been letting the lorries

and the cash roll in.

He set up his rubbish dump by convincing companies

he had permission to run a landfill that could take all

sorts of products, but he was faking it.

The truth is, he was only allowed to throw down

soil and stone to build a farm track.

Instead, he was selling the opportunity for companies to

dump all kinds of waste here.

He was trying to cover up his crime by putting a layer of stones on top.

A staggering 80,000 tonnes of rubbish later, authorities were

dealing with one of the biggest fake landfill sites in the country.

The impact of that colossal amount of rubbish is that it's now

necessary to keep a close eye on the water on site,

testing it for contaminants.

What we're going to do, we're going to go on the site today,

Ashley's going to take some samples.

-Put your wellies on, and let's get it done, OK?

-Yeah.

-OK, great, come on.

The site is now grassed over,

but it's what lurks beneath that's the real problem.

There's too much material to move

and it now means experts have to check the site every few months.

More than 20 companies had been dumping all sorts of rubbish

onto the land.

The companies told investigators that Morris had showed them

a permit. Reese Hughes is an environmental crime officer.

He took over the case when they realised

how large and complex it was.

Some of those were taking high risk wastes, things that biodegrade in the

soil which they certainly shouldn't have been taking to the site.

Morris was claiming that they had the relevant permissions to do so,

while clearly he didn't.

Morris was found guilty at Newport Crown Court of an offence

under the Environmental Protection Act.

He got 300 hours community service

and a ten-month jail sentence that was suspended.

They worked out he'd made more than a quarter of a million pounds.

This is a very irresponsible act.

It's illegal, it's dangerous to the environment

and also harmful to communities.

Regulated landfills have infrastructure in place to

minimise and stop pollution to the environment.

Morris didn't have any of this.

The impact of that is there could be potential pollution to

things like ground water, but, also, landfill gas can be

produced which is potentially very harmful to human health.

With a risk to the local population and wildlife,

it's the unknown material that lies beneath that's most worrying.

We don't know exactly what wastes were buried on this site.

Hopefully, work will be done in the future to ascertain that.

The shocking thing about this is just how widespread

the problem actually is.

In the UK, recent figures show authorities

shut down around 25 illegal sites every week.

Recent water samples taken from this site show that,

although water quality had improved, it still contains contaminants.

There's a really strong smell still, which indicates to us

the presence of chemicals, etc, still in the water, like ammonia,

so we're going to send them away today, just to check those levels.

The faker that tried to turn trash into cash could be

a burden on the countryside for years to come,

but Morris is being pursued under the Proceeds of Crime Act to

get back the money he's made.

We wish to take the profit out of waste crime to retrieve

the ill-gotten gains and, hopefully,

reinvest it in this site to protect the environment.

Earlier, we heard how police in Manchester had a problem.

Criminals faking their identity had been using their credentials

to rob and kidnap people.

Their crimes were becoming more violent.

The police needed to find out who the fakers were and fast.

Roy Story's team had put this house under surveillance.

They suspected this man, Connor Smith-Macphee,

of committing robberies on cash-in-transit vans.

But while watching the people who were coming and going here,

they found a vital piece of evidence that would link them to the

fake police crimes...

a stolen Audi A3.

Whilst we were doing our investigation into

Connor Smith-Macphee and his associates, we became aware that

they had possession of a stolen Audi A3 that was on false numberplates.

While we were conducting observations at that address,

we saw Connor Smith-Macphee get into that Audi and leave the area.

It then became apparent, two or three days later, that that vehicle

had been used in a robbery at a jewellers in Preston

and the significance of that was the people who committed that robbery had

gone into that premises purporting to be police officers,

dressed as police officers,

saying that had a warrant to search the premises for stolen jewellery.

They'd restrained the occupants of the shop at the time using handcuffs

and cable ties and they'd stolen quite a large amount of jewellery.

The Audi that was used at this job in Preston

and the use of police uniforms tied Macphee to the fake police crime.

He was clearly involved somehow in the robbery,

but police wanted the whole gang.

A couple of days after the job at the jewellers,

they captured this footage.

A group of men are pictured coming back to Macphee's address

carrying a large holdall.

Days later, Connor Smith-Macphee was filmed burning things

in his back garden.

It was difficult cos we suspected he was burning evidence.

It was within the days following the robbery in Preston,

we suspected it was evidence from there.

We were keen to act on that, but the chances were that actually

have jeopardised the investigation if we'd have acted too soon.

At this stage, the evidence was all circumstantial,

but the fakers' reckless behaviour was about to give police a lead.

An unmarked traffic car was on patrol

when they just happened to see two vehicles that appeared to be

travelling in convoy and both went through a red light.

SIRENS WAIL

Left, left!

This footage shows a Vauxhall Insignia and a Mercedes

jumping a red light in the Chadderton area of Manchester.

It was to give John Andrew a vital breakthrough.

So, the officers tried to stop both the vehicles, at which point,

there was a Mercedes that tried to block the police officers in.

He's off!

While the second car, which was a Vauxhall Insignia,

made off from the police,

so there was a brief pursuit where the police car chased

the Vauxhall Insignia, which was sort of abandoned nearby,

which two males were seen to abandon and run off from the vehicle,

so, after a brief pursuit,

the officers were able to capture both males,

which was Richard Clancy and Matthew Cheston,

both of which were dressed in police officer-type uniform

and then a further search of the vehicle recovered numerous

other police related items such as handcuffs, body armour,

and, nearby where they'd been arrested,

false police identification was found as well

with both the males' pictures on,

giving the impression that, once they had everything on,

they would look like genuine police officers.

SIRENS WAIL

The car was pulled in for forensic examination...

and it was full of evidence linking

the fake police offices to the crimes.

Connor Smith-Macphee had made a crucial mistake.

We'd linked him to the Vauxhall Insignia as he'd actually

rented that out and his passport was found in the vehicle.

Connor Smith-Macphee was arrested.

A search of his rented address revealed these burnt out

jewellery trays linking him to the fake police officer job in Preston.

We were happy we had our bogus police officers in custody.

Whilst they were in custody being processed and being interviewed,

another offence was reported of bogus police officers.

But this time the description given to the police was of

a black male suspect.

They knew there was another faker out there, but who was he?

Roy reviewed his surveillance footage of Connor Smith-Macphee.

He captured him meeting up with this man, Kelvin Raymond.

On that particular day,

he went to the Farnworth area of Bolton where he met up with

a number of males, one of them we later identified as Kelvin Raymond.

SIRENS WAIL

A raid on Raymond's flat revealed jackets containing warrant

cards, victims' mobiles and wads of cash.

They knew they had another fake policeman.

Kelvin Raymond got sentenced to nine years in jail.

And today the hard work of the real police has paid off.

The rest of gang has been sentenced.

Connor Smith-Macphee got nine years for his part in the crimes.

Most of the others were sent down for nearly a decade each.

All defendants have received lengthy custodial sentences

and I'm pleased because it sends out a message to the victims

that this has been taken seriously, the matter's been dealt with.

It's really important for public confidence.

We need to have the public have trust in us.

If people are going to breach that trust

and pretend to be police officers,

it completely undermines the good work that we do as the police.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.