Episode 6 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Police!

Get down! Get down! Get on the floor now!

Put your hands behind your back now.

Here at the Fake Britain house,

we'll reveal the fakes that are flooding the market,

conning people like you and me

and making money for the criminals.

We'll investigate the fraudsters

who are selling us something that isn't real

and could be dangerous.

And we'll help you avoid falling for a fake.

Today on Fake Britain - how fake documents are being used to

smuggle illegal food and animal products into the country.

This is absolutely an illegal product.

There are no approved establishments in China for the export of beef.

The single fake e-mail which cost one house-buying couple

nearly £100,000.

It was just utter shock. Disbelief.

It never occurred to me that somebody could do this

so simply and so convincingly.

Her work is highly collectable,

but could you tell the real Clarice Cliff from the fake?

I can tell straight away.

The first thing that really shouts out is the colour palette.

And our investigation uncovers how banned, cancer-causing dyes

are being used to fake the colour of food.

Consuming any of it at all

is going to increase an individual's risk of contracting cancer.

It simply shouldn't be present in food that we're eating.

Much of what we eat comes from abroad -

around £40 billion worth of food every year.

And it's all subject to strict safety standards.

The problem is enforcing those standards

and keeping our borders secure is tough when the volume of trade

is so huge and the fakers are trying so desperately to beat the system.

The port of Southampton.

1.3 million containers are unloaded here every year,

about a third of them containing food or animal-related products.

This type of import is high-risk,

as not only is it destined for our dinner plates,

but it could be contaminated with chemicals, toxins or disease.

Making sure that nothing harmful gets through

is the job of the Port Health team, led by Sandra Westacott.

We're right at the front line. This is the first

and perhaps only opportunity that we will

get for checking food before the products go on to the market.

The temptation to commit frauds is extraordinary.

And economically, you stand a much better chance

of evading any regulatory response

with food fraud than you do with drugs.

Port Health inspects a small percentage

of all the shipments coming into port.

Anything from fish...

Tuna offcuts!

..to Japanese specialities.

Roasted seaweed.

Some rice wine. Tasty rice crackers.

Even kitchenware, which is subject

to similar controls to the food itself.

They're...goblets.

Samples are sent off for scientific analysis

and cargoes which don't meet the right standards

can be detained or rejected.

But the whole inspection regime relies on the paperwork

provided by the importers and shipping companies,

starting with the ship's manifests.

I can see from the manifest description

what is in a container.

Some of the containers we will be very interested in.

Others, we will not be.

As well as a manifest,

all the items are accompanied by certification which confirm

that all the goods are safe and have been tested before being exported,

to show they meet EU standards.

But all too often, the paperwork and documents are inaccurate,

or even fake.

Fake documentation can be a real problem.

Fraudulent certificates.

Certificates that do not bear any resemblance

to the actual commodity.

Out on the forecourt,

a container recently arrived from China

has been selected for inspection.

And from the paperwork,

Sandra should know exactly what to expect inside.

The packing list says,

"sesame paste, iced tea, chilli,

"vermicelli, rice noodles."

Only this time, she's in for a surprise,

as inside the container, Sandra immediately spots

what appear to be additional items.

That's chilli powder, which could contain aflatoxins.

These look like they're some sort of electronic games.

This stuff was not declared on all of the legal documents.

This bears no comparison to the packing list.

It's a fake packing list.

The undeclared items don't come with any safety certification,

so Sandra will need to give them all a thorough inspection

to make sure they're legal and safe.

We have what I think is...sesame paste.

And it smells like sesame paste,

but it also smells of peanut.

There is no English at all here.

So, for somebody who's buying that, if there were peanuts in there

and they were allergic to peanuts,

then that could cause them some very serious health problems.

But the labelling issues are just the start,

as Sandra soon finds further evidence of a deliberate attempt

to evade import controls.

We have images of electronic materials,

and when we open, we find...

pouches of animal fat.

I think that it is either duck,

shredded duck,

or possibly even beef.

As animal products are subject to strict import controls,

Sandra is suspicious.

So are we using fake boxes

to hide something that shouldn't be coming into the country?

And suspicions appear to be confirmed

when even more animal product is found disguised in other boxes.

A drinking set, a jug, and glasses.

But when we come in, we have foodstuffs.

The ingredients are beef fat, as the primary ingredient.

This is a completely banned product.

This is an illegal product.

There are no approved establishments in China

for the export of beef products to the European Union.

For us, that's a real, real concern.

So the fake packing list is hiding illegal imports of animal products.

Another thing it didn't mention is alcohol.

This is some sort of rice spirit.

We think this is beer.

56% alcohol.

All this is evidence of yet another crime.

I'm concluding that they tried to conceal this

to evade any sort of taxation or import duties to customs.

It is smuggling.

But it's not just the hidden contents of the container

which are troubling Sandra.

There's also the standard of hygiene.

Filth.

The containers and the products should be clean, coming through.

This could easily be the cause of another foot-and-mouth outbreak.

If that is duck product,

it could be the source of avian influenza.

There are all sorts of very, very worrying things

about this container.

To make matters even worse, Sandra makes a horrifying discovery.

Oh, and that's rat droppings.

24 years...I think I have seen one container with rat droppings in.

24 years.

The discovery means that this container poses a health risk

much greater than Sandra had already feared.

Rats carry not only...plague,

but they also, you know, they can also have Weil's disease,

if they've urinated anywhere in the box,

which I presume they have.

We haven't found any live rats, but the rat droppings...

It's very clear that they have been in the container.

You know, this consignment could lead to so many animal health

and so many public health problems as well.

Unsurprisingly, the container was rejected for entry into the UK.

And after a thorough investigation,

the importer only narrowly escaped criminal charges.

But for Sandra, it's a potent reminder

of the huge risks posed to the public by food fakery.

This container is one of the worst examples,

in terms of the risk to public and animal health,

I have seen in 24 years.

This is not just about it being a con,

this is actually dangerous as well.

Buying a house can be a stressful experience -

finding a property, selling the old place,

packing everything, arranging removals.

At least you can rely on a well-proven system

and the professionals to handle the legal stuff,

and the financial transactions.

But now, the huge sums involved in house buying and selling

is attracting the fakers,

and they have simple but staggeringly effective ways

to get their hands on our cash.

Buying a property is one of the biggest decisions you ever make,

and today's house buyers stretch themselves to the financial limit,

parting with eye-watering sums of money to secure their dream home.

But property transactions are proving to be

rich pickings for fraudsters.

Previously on Fake Britain, we've heard from Nick Christophi,

who was targeted by one such scam.

I'd done all the right things.

I bought through estate agents, through the solicitors,

I got the keys off the estate agent.

Paid over our money and everything.

Nick parted with £735,000 for a new home.

Yet, after moving in, he discovered that the house hadn't been paid for.

It turned out the firm of solicitors

hired by the property's seller was bogus, set up by fraudsters

who disappeared with his cash.

I've worked hard all my life to provide for me and my family.

And just for that to be taken away from you, it was devastating.

I didn't think it was possible

that anything like that could ever happen.

But it did happen.

And as Fake Britain found out, Nick was one of a number of victims

of similar scams involving fake solicitors.

Now we're hearing of a new type of fraud targeting house purchases.

After seeing Nick's story,

we were contacted by Tom and Gay Henrick

who'd been targeted while buying a holiday home.

This time, the tactic used by the criminals

was astonishingly simple, but just as effective.

We were looking for somewhere that we could go to,

since we've retired,

and spend some time just relaxing, really.

We also have a daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren

and we thought it would be lovely for them,

during the summer holidays.

They hadn't been searching for long when they came across

what they thought would be their dream property,

in Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast.

The location was fantastic.

It's literally ten minutes from the sea.

Tom and Gay had an offer on the flat accepted,

and at first, the buying process appeared to be going smoothly.

But as the completion date approached,

things took a turn for the worse.

We were making payments towards the property in stages,

and then, all of a sudden, we had an e-mail to say could we transfer

the remaining funds to a different sort code and account number.

It appeared as if it had come from our solicitor,

so off went the funds.

Asking for the money to be put into another account,

because we were close to completion, didn't seem that unusual to me.

It was only on the day of completion,

when I had a phone call from our solicitor

basically saying that the money wasn't in place,

so the completion of the property would not take place.

I actually thought that the solicitor was being ridiculous.

I thought, "He must have the funds,

"we've got the bank statement to prove the money's left our account."

And just thought it was a silly, silly mistake on his part.

I went down to see him, and brought down my iPad

and showed him the e-mails, and then it all came to light.

The account that the money went into was not the solicitor's,

and the e-mail that purported to be from the solicitors

wasn't from the solicitors either.

The painful realisation began to dawn

that the e-mail was fake.

They'd been the victim of a deliberate deception,

and their cash had been stolen.

It was just utter shock. Disbelief.

What was most shocking was how easy the scam appeared to be,

relying on just one fake e-mail.

This is the e-mail I received. The e-mail address looks,

initially, exactly the same.

And it's only under great scrutiny

that you find there is one digit missing.

Very, very difficult to spot.

It's almost certain that the culprits were computer hackers

who'd known about the property purchase by intercepting e-mail

between the Henricks and their solicitor.

It's a crime which lawyer and cybercrime expert David Cook

has seen many times.

This hack relies on a person sitting on an e-mail account

and listening for transactions going between two different people.

I call this an e-mail piggy-back scam,

and it doesn't really matter how somebody hacks

into an e-mail account, although there's a variety of ways,

but once they are in there, they listen out.

When they hear about details of a transaction,

they then send a false invoice.

And the two different people who are a part of the transaction

don't realise it's happened.

The fake e-mail or invoice gives the hackers' bank details,

allowing them to walk off with huge sums of cash.

It's a brazen crime which David says is rising sharply.

These sorts of scams are becoming much more frequent now.

I'd say it's doubled in the last 12 months or so.

I'd probably see about one a month at the moment

and they range from, at the lower end of the scale,

about £50,000, right up to £250,000-£300,000.

It's certainly becoming a much more frequent problem.

What's most galling for Tom and Gay

is that had they known what to look out for,

the theft would have been easy to prevent.

You're not going to necessarily know

that somebody's sitting in your e-mail account,

monitoring your e-mails, but the thing is

when you receive an invoice, it's wise to check it out.

So the invoice which has come by e-mail,

have a read of the e-mail,

see if it's in the sort of language you'd expect

for a professional transaction or professional person to have sent.

Of course, if they've built up a relationship

and it's the same account, over and over again,

they don't need to check the details,

because they know the person at the other end.

But where it's a one-off or unusual transaction,

or the nature of the transaction has changed -

"Actually, don't send money to that account, send it to this account",

ring up and make sure it's legitimate before you transfer,

because you never know.

Despite reporting the fraud immediately,

so far, only some of Tom and Gay's money has been recovered.

They did still manage to buy their holiday flat

by cashing in part of their pension, but it's been a big financial blow.

It's a large amount of money to lose when you're both retired

and you've got, sort of, a limited income, really.

It has had a terrible effect and caused us a lot of distress

and sleepless nights.

It will make a big difference to us.

Things like holidays, replacing the car,

general maintenance of things on the house will have to go on hold.

It's as simple as that.

I really don't think, if I was buying a property again,

I would ever put anything of a sensitive nature in an e-mail.

The work of Staffordshire ceramics maker Clarice Cliff

is very collectable.

Her bright, distinctive patterns are instantly recognisable

and if you enjoy browsing for antiques,

there's a strong chance you'll have come across her work.

But beware, because you may also come across things like this -

fake Clarice Cliff.

If you're chasing a collectable Clarice,

how do you avoid falling for the fake?

Clarice Cliff, for me, is certainly one of the greatest ceramic

designers of the 20th century.

Bright, colourful and highly recognisable.

These designs are all the work of one woman - Clarice Cliff.

Raised in the Staffordshire potteries

around the turn of the century,

it's estimated that more than eight million pieces bear her name.

Auctioneer Will Farmer is one of the UK's

foremost experts on her work.

She completely broke tradition,

she was a Potteries girls through and through,

and broke through in what was an incredibly male-orientated industry

to become one of the pioneers

in terms of shaping taste, style, colour,

pattern and form in the interwar period.

Clarice is highly collectable

and while some pieces can be picked up for as little as £10,

rare items can fetch as much as much as 80,000.

And that's proved too tempting for some.

As this market grew, as people started to spend serious money

on this as a commodity and as an investment,

people on the outside looking in

think this is the perfect opportunity

to make a quick buck - and the result?

You're going to get fakes.

Fakes like these.

So this collection here on the table

is actually my own personal rogues' gallery.

These pieces, all four of these, are actually fakes.

They fall into sort of... a couple of specific categories.

The first is the out-and-out forgery -

that's seen in this example here.

This vase is just wrong from top to bottom.

Everything about it is incorrect.

The other side, and slightly scarier,

are the genuine pieces of Clarice

which have then been later decorated.

This plate, for example, started life as a purely plain plate.

And what somebody has done

is they've taken a genuine Clarice Cliff pattern,

but painted it up later with enamels to sort of deceive somebody

that what they've got is a much earlier and much better piece.

And the fakes aren't hard to find.

Through various e-mails and looking online

and handling pieces that come through the door, I would say,

on average, I certainly see a fake piece at least once a month.

Which means for amateur collectors like Michael Swann,

buying and selling Clarice Cliff can be a risky business.

That didn't stop him diving in when, 20 years ago,

a Clarice piece caught his eye.

Well, I was a delivery driver, a delivery man,

stopping in antique shops, charity shops, second-hand shops,

just looking for various bargains that I liked.

And I went into one, I believe it was in Coventry.

It was a Clarice Cliff vase in the middle of this shop window.

I loved it immediately, negotiated with the owner for £150

and bought it.

This is the vase in question.

As you can see, it's got the traditional Clarice Cliff

Night and Day design,

with a wonderful Bizarre mark at the bottom.

It's got lovely colours. Just looked so good, so nice, so clean.

The vase retained pride of place in Michael's living room

for two decades, and he never questioned its authenticity.

But then recently, he decided to sell it.

Michael took the vase to auctioneer Rick Alexander.

A relative newcomer in the auctioneering world,

Rick was more than happy to enter Michael's vase

into their winter sale.

My first impressions of the piece was that it was just in line

with typical Clarice of that period.

You're talking about a piece that's 80, 90 years old, circa 1930s.

The stamp all seemed to be right, so we were quite happy with it.

And when Rick researched the vase further, excitement grew.

I initially put a valuation of £400-600 on it, but then,

after I started researching former auction prices,

I realised that it could actually fetch probably,

like, £3,000, £4,000.

It seemed like it was quite a collectable piece.

Rick catalogued the item, taking pictures and videos,

which he put on their website.

Before long, the vase was creating a buzz.

Straight away, we had two or three people leaving telephone bids.

We had a couple of regular dealers that came in,

they handled the item, they were happy to leave commission bids.

They booked a telephone line as well, for the sale.

It generated the interest that we expected.

But Rick's confidence was short-lived.

My initial doubts were raised when I had an e-mail from a collector.

He said, "Oh, there's something that doesn't look quite right with it."

So I asked him to elaborate.

He was mentioning the colours on it

and something not quite right about the shades.

The collector suspected that the vase might be a fake,

putting Rick in a tricky situation.

Two days before the sale, I had another collector that came on,

expressed the same kind of doubts.

And so, at this point, I was in a bit of a dilemma

of exactly what to do.

It was an item that was going to sell for £4,000,

so it was a big piece to have any problems with.

So we got to the day before the sale

and decided to withdraw it from sale,

pending further investigation.

So could the vase be a fake?

During the course of our filming,

we were alerted to about a dozen possible fakes being sold online

and in auction rooms up and down the country,

so there's no shortage of forgeries out there.

But is this vase one of them?

To find out, Rick's decided to make a trip to the West Midlands,

to get a final verdict.

If it does prove to be fake,

it'll be a huge disappointment for the auction house.

The cataloguing, the photographing,

there's so much effort goes into this

and if it turns out to be fake, then basically,

all the work's been done for nothing.

If anyone's going to be able to verify the vase's authenticity,

it's auctioneer and expert Will Farmer,

who reckons he handles more Clarice Cliff

than anyone else in the country.

Under his beady eye, it doesn't take very long to reach a conclusion.

-Here's the infamous piece.

-OK. Yep.

Well, I can tell straight away.

The first thing that really shouts out is the colour palette.

The colours that are here are all slightly wrong.

You know, the blue's leaning towards purple,

the yellow's too pale, the orange is too washy.

-Yeah.

-Add to that the weight of the vase.

-It's not right.

-No.

Knowing that you were bringing this in today,

I've actually got a genuine piece of same pattern.

I think putting the two side-by-side,

it does nothing short than really nail the lid on the coffin

of that vase being a fake, I'm afraid.

Absolutely, and it's confirmed our suspicions,

which is why we took it out of the sale.

And for vendor Michael Swann, the news comes as a surprise.

It didn't even enter my head that it was a fake.

I just thought I'd got an absolute bargain.

At £150, a lovely Bizarre Night and Day Clarice Cliff vase -

I'd hit a little jackpot.

But Michael remains philosophical.

Having loved owning the vase for 20 years,

he refuses to be angry about the forgery.

Well, I'm a bit disappointed, but when Rick told me that

it was examined by one of the foremost experts on Clarice Cliff,

I have to take his word for it.

It would have been nice for it to be genuine,

but if it's not, it's not.

When it comes to food,

how something looks can be just as important as how it tastes.

Take these spices.

It's not just the smell and flavour which make them appealing,

but also their bright, attractive colours,

which we assume to be fresh and natural.

But when the food fakers get involved,

it's not always the case.

Dangerous and illegal ingredients may be added

to make the product look better... and it's putting our health at risk.

From sweets to sauces and soft drinks,

colourings are added to many food products,

and as long as they're listed on the ingredients and they're safe,

they're perfectly legal.

But there is a darker side to food additives.

In 2005, a food colouring called Sudan I

was at the centre of one of Britain's biggest ever food recalls.

Watch what you eat -

that's the warning from the Food Standards Agency

after the discovery that a potentially cancer-causing dye

has found its way into hundreds of common food products.

Sudan I had been banned two years earlier

after being linked to cancer,

but, despite this, was found to have made it into dozens of products

via a contaminated batch of chilli powder used in a sauce.

Supermarkets have been ordered to clear the items from their shelves

and the public told not to eat them.

But that wasn't the end of the problem.

In West Yorkshire, the Trading Standards' food team

have found further products containing illegal dyes.

We looked at samples of Asian confectionery that had, literally,

a fluorescent pink colour to them.

And this included looking at mixtures of seeds

where some of the seeds were a very bright pink colour,

and found them to contain rhodamine B.

Now, rhodamine B is a suspected carcinogen.

It's not permitted for use in food.

The type of product Duncan is talking about are these -

sugar-coated fennel seeds, which, in Asian cuisine,

are often served at the end of a meal as a tasty breath freshener.

Clearly the sweets have been artificially coloured,

but how often does the fakery include the use of illegal dyes?

To find out, we're conducting an experiment of our own,

buying randomly selected brands of sugar-coated fennel seeds

from shops across the capital.

And we're sending ten of them

to West Yorkshire Analytical Services to be tested.

Some of these samples are a mixture of many different colours,

different types of food within the sample,

so we're separating out the bright pink component

and then that's shaken up with a solvent.

The solvent is turned bright pink by the powerful food dyes,

but are these dyes legal?

Duncan's analysis will soon have the answer

and it's not long before he finds a problem with one of the samples.

We can see a peak here which is rhodamine B

and this is a level of about 32mg per kilogram.

It's not just the one.

In fact, three of our ten purchases have been proven to contain

the banned dye, making them both illegal and dangerous.

Consuming any of it at all is going

to increase an individual's risk of contracting cancer.

It simply shouldn't be present in food that we're eating

and it's illegal to sell that food.

Nevertheless, all three products are being openly sold in Britain.

We've passed on the results of our analysis to Trading Standards

and have asked them to investigate.

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.