Episode 6 Fake Britain

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

Welcome to Fake Britain.

Police! Move it!

-Get down!

-Get down!

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.

We reveal the websites helping students to fake their way

to a degree.

I've just typed in "essay help"

and this whole first page is just

filled with adverts for essay-writing companies.

It's not fair on those students that actually put the effort in.

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.

There is 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 that 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 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 heard from Nick Christophi,

who was targeted by one such scam.

I 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

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 10 minutes from the sea.

It was very close to the golf course, which I quite like.

And you can see the river.

Aldeburgh is just a lovely place to be, really.

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.

When Tom returned home from the solicitors, he just said,

"We've been scammed for, well, it was actually 98,000."

And I looked at him in disbelief and thought,

"Oh, this is some kind of sick joke."

And then realised that he was quite serious,

and 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 had never occurred to me that somebody could do this

so simply and so convincingly.

It's almost certain that the culprits were computer hackers

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

between the Hendricks 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 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 would 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 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 for 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.

-I actually sort of recognise this vase.

-Right.

I've known this vase.

There was a batch of fakes that hit the market in the last 20 years.

-Right.

-There was a number of them done in really top-flight patterns.

-Right.

-And whoever was doing them was totally doing them to deceive.

-Right.

-So they will have taken a mould off a genuine vase,

which means that the size and the shape of this piece

-is slightly wrong.

-Yeah.

So the paints we've touched on, but then also, the key thing here,

this mark - it's almost trying too hard.

-Scale-wise, it's sort of nearly there.

-Yeah.

But this foot rim, the ground underneath,

it's missing its honey glaze, you know,

it's missing that sort of quality.

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. Thank you very much.

-My pleasure.

-Thank you.

-No problem.

-Now to tell the vendor.

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.

These are 2,000-word essays, complete with quotations and references,

ready to be handed in at a college or university for marking.

It's estimated that it would take a student a full week of work

and research to write one of these. Or it could

be bought for a couple of hundred pounds, handed in as original work,

and someone could fake their way to a qualification.

Those cheats could be getting jobs they just don't deserve.

This is what taking a degree is supposed to look like -

hours of dedicated study, afternoons spent in the university library.

But now there's a booming industry of websites where,

instead of students writing their own essays, they can buy them.

At Birmingham City University,

computing lecturers Thomas Lancaster and Bob Clark have for years

been researching the growth of a phenomenon

they call contract cheating.

Contract cheating is where a student uses a third party to produce

original work for them, and one of the main ways they

do that are by using online companies, called essay mills.

To show us the scale of the problem, Thomas is logging on.

Here I am in Google.

I've just typed in "essay help" and this whole first page is

just filled with adverts for essay-writing companies.

These so-called essay mills sell bespoke, made-to-order essays

on any subject, written by their own researchers.

So if I click through to one of these services,

all kinds of different types of work that can be delivered here.

Everything from essays to coursework,

even up to a full research proposal or dissertation.

You could even get this done with a three-hour service -

perfect if you've let your work to the last minute.

The websites say their essays

are meant to help students with their research.

They also promise strict confidentiality

and Thomas says their real purpose is obvious.

They're providing students with fake coursework,

which they'll hand in as if it's their own work.

Many students have been caught doing it

and Thomas believes many more are going undetected.

Getting someone else to write your essay for you

dates back to the '50s and '60s,

when there used to be adverts in the back of newspapers,

but it's really ballooned with the growth of the internet.

The ease with which students can cheat is amazing.

So how easy do essay mills make it

for students to fake their coursework?

To find out, we're joining one of Thomas's computer science classes,

and they've been set an essay to write.

It's an assignment where students have to write

a review of academic literature, so it's quite challenging.

It involves a lot of reading, putting together information,

synthesising it, identifying and critiquing themes.

We'd expect students to put in about 45 hours of effort

to get a good mark in that assignment.

Alongside the real students,

this assignment is also going to be completed by our researcher.

As she doesn't know anything at all about computing,

she's unlikely to get a very good mark,

at least not without the help

of one of the UK's largest essay mill sites, UK Essays.

Hi, I've got an essay I need to write by next week

and I wondered if this is something you can help with?

OK, what kind of subject area is it in?

It's computer science.

UK Essays says it can provide us

with a completely original bespoke assignment in less than a day.

But as we're in no hurry, we opt for a week-long turnaround.

Were you looking for a 2:2, a 2:1 or a first?

-A 2:1.

-OK, that'll be £275.

So a 2,000-word essay for £275 within a week.

In fact, it arrives in just three days

and we give it to Thomas Lancaster to mark.

It certainly meets the style and format we'd expect

from a review from one of our students.

The references are all up to date, so their sources are from 2015

and the themes are well reviewed. An excellent writing style.

The conclusion is a little bit short and limited,

so there's more work that could have been done on that section.

-And the verdict?

-I'd see this as a mark of 65%, which is a 2:1.

Just as UK Essays had promised.

What's more, Thomas says there's no way

he'd be able to tell the coursework was fake.

There's nothing that stands out as being wrong with this essay.

It's well written, it matches what we asked for in the assignment brief

and it's written in UK English,

so there's nothing that stands out to me

that says this has been written by a third party.

The rest of the class has also completed the essay,

only in their case, using hard graft.

So what do they make of our fake coursework

and the website that provided it?

I put about 100 hours into the essay, so the fact that someone

could just go out there and buy it really disgusts me.

It's not fair on the students that put the effort in.

What's the point in being at a university

if you're not going to apply yourself and earn your degree?

I think I got about 65% and the fact that people can go online

and buy these essays,

it's kind of disgraceful because it devalues my degree.

A sentiment echoed by the teachers.

Students are getting an award which they're not entitled to.

They haven't done their own work,

they haven't gone through all the hard sweat and slog

needed to get a university degree

and students are then applying for jobs

which they have no business applying for.

Let's imagine you're treated by a nurse

who's cheated their way through their degree course.

What if they prescribe you the wrong amount of medication?

So how do these essay mill sites get away with it?

The answer is that they say the essays they sell

are never meant to be handed in.

They're model answers designed to help students with their research.

Daniel Dennehy is the customer care manager at UK Essays,

the company from which we bought our essay.

We're not helping students cheat, no.

We're here as a learning guide,

a learning tool to help students get the very best out of university.

We can do the research for them, but they still need to read it,

understand it and still produce their own work from that.

Ours is only a guide, a model answer.

We're just putting a number of thoughts across

on one particular essay.

But that's a claim Thomas Lancaster describes as ludicrous.

Not many students are going to go out there and pay for work

and then do nothing else with it

because universities provide plenty of model essays and support already.

And there's another question - what exactly are UK Essays doing

to stop students from using their essays as their own fake coursework?

We can't guarantee that they won't hand the work in.

From speaking to the customers over the last eight years,

I know for a fact that a majority of our customers

do use the work correctly,

but if one of our agents on the phone fully understands

when they're talking to the customer

and they say to us, "I'm going to hand the work in,"

then, as a company, we won't help them.

But many essay mill companies simply turn a blind eye to cheating.

Our imaginary student contacted ten of them to find out

what they'd say if she made it perfectly clear

she planned to hand in their essay as her own.

Will I need to do some more work on the essay

or will it be ready to hand in?

Only three companies, one of them UK Essays,

told us we couldn't do this.

You do need to make sure you use the work in accordance

with our fair use policy, which is to use it as a perfect example,

learn from it and then write it in your own words.

Three said they didn't recommend that we hand the work in,

but made it clear that they wouldn't stop us.

We say you need to rewrite it,

but it'll be sent in a format that can be submitted.

We don't recommend that, obviously.

-But can I still order it from you?

-Yes.

And four of the companies said we could hand the work in.

Once the paper is completed, you may download, check it

and if you're satisfied, you can submit it.

No-one knows just how many students are faking their coursework,

but it's clear the problem is rife.

Hearing that essay-writing services were being openly advertised

outside university buildings in London,

we sent our researcher to take a look

and sure enough,

flyer after flyer posted by writers offering coursework for cash.

Back at Birmingham City University, lecturers Thomas Lancaster

and Bob Clarke have taken matters into their own hands,

gathering as much evidence as they can about the scale of the epidemic.

Bob even spends hours monitoring websites,

looking for any clues to identify students that are cheating.

And in five years, he's personally reported 1,000 students

across the world to their universities.

For students contemplating handing in a piece of fake coursework,

he has one simple piece of advice.

Don't do it. You're only cheating yourself

and you're cheating your friends.

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 common food and drink 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.

Jo Hamer leads the food team at West Yorkshire Trading Standards.

One product that's on their radar is chilli powder.

As Trading Standards officers, we sample various food things.

Chilli we look for, because it's a vibrant colour.

We look to see if there's been any colour added to it

that shouldn't be there. So the brighter the colour,

the more vibrant, the more aesthetically pleasing to a customer

and the more likely to increase a sale, I suppose.

A few years ago, there was some colour

that was not approved for use in the EU, found in chilli powders.

That dye was called Sudan I and in 2005,

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.

It's Trading Standards' job to make sure that instances like this

don't happen again, so Jo and her food team

regularly carry out routine sampling,

buying items from the supermarket shelves and getting them tested.

On a recent trip to the Holbeck area of Leeds, they made what would

prove to be an interesting purchase from a shop called Venus Foods.

Two of the products that we test purchased

or we took a formal sample of were the chilli powders.

The samples were taken back to the labs

at West Yorkshire Analytical Services,

where they were tested by public analyst Duncan Campbell.

A small amount of the sample is weighed out

and extracted with a solvent,

so if any dyes are present in the chilli powder,

they dissolve into the solvent and then those dyes -

it might be a mixture of dyes -

are separated and quantified using a chromatographic technique.

The testing should uncover any colourings

that have been added to the food,

but Duncan will in particular be looking out for Sudan I.

If we can find any at all in a food,

it's illegal, it shouldn't be on sale.

So what did the analysis of the chilli powder

bought at Venus Foods show?

So here we're looking at the trace from the sample of chilli powder

and it contains two illegal dyes.

The first one is Sudan I and the one eluting later is Sudan IV

and we can tell from our calibration standards

and the size of these peaks

that we're looking at 1,500mg per kilogram of Sudan I

and about 460mg per kilogram of Sudan IV.

The chilli contained not one, but two banned dyes,

both linked with cancer, and the quantity present

leaves Duncan in no doubt that there's been foul play.

At the levels we're finding in these samples,

it's to enhance the quality of the product. It's fake.

It's basically a poor quality of chilli powder.

It might have been around for a long time, it's looking brown,

it's not going to be very saleable at a wholesale level

or back down the supply chain

so the deliberate addition of Sudan I, Sudan IV

gives it a deep red colour.

A fake product, something pretending to be what it's not.

It was a deliberate fraud, but also a serious risk to public health.

Both of these substances are carcinogenic, so there is a danger

eating a chilli powder containing them

or a food made with that chilli powder is going to increase

an individual's risk of contracting cancer.

For the Trading Standards team,

the discovery of the Sudan dyes required urgent investigation.

When we found the results from the public analyst,

it was obviously something we had to react on quite quickly.

We knew that somewhere down the supply chain,

whether that was at the manufacturers, suppliers

or the retailers, the traders, there had been some kind of food fakery.

Somebody had committed food fraud.

At that stage, we didn't know where

so we returned to the business to let them know about the results

and make sure that no other of the same batch were still left on sale,

as it shouldn't have ever been on the UK market to begin with.

Jo and her team acted fast, taking more samples

and making further inquiries.

In the end, they concluded that the retailer itself, Venus Foods,

had a case to answer.

Our investigation showed that they had no due diligence,

they hadn't taken reasonable precautions to stop this offence

from happening and we decided to present a case to court.

The company had to pay out £10,000 in fines and costs

for selling the illegal chilli and other food offences.

The magistrates obviously grasped the severity of the case

with that quite substantial fine.

The most important thing, really,

is that that product is no longer on the market,

which we're assured that it is not.

We have since been back and tested further chilli products

and they were clear of any Sudan I or IV dyes,

so we're happy with the result of the case.

But chilli powder isn't the only product which the food team

in West Yorkshire has recently found to contain illegal dyes.

We looked at samples of Asian confectionery that literally

had 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 the 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.