Episode 1 Fake Britain

Welcome to a world where nothing is as it seems.

Welcome to Fake Britain.

-Police!

-SHOUTING

-Get down! Get down!

-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,

the fake life-saving equipment that got into the NHS...

This would break under any serious pressure.

Life lost.

..the fake cigarettes hidden right under our noses...

It was reinforced.

When you see what was in the back of the van, you can see why.

..and the chilling story of the fake ice cream vans.

The quality of workmanship was shocking.

Potentially a safety hazard going down the road.

Here on Fake Britain, we're constantly amazed

at the lengths the fakers will go to, to make money.

Look at this. It's a Combat Application Tourniquet,

used on patients who have a very real risk

of dying through blood loss.

They're carried by the military, the police and also ambulance crews.

It may not look like much,

but it could be the difference between life and death.

This one, though, won't be saving any lives.

It's highly dangerous because it doesn't work.

It's a fake and, alarmingly,

fakes like this have found their way into the NHS.

Every single ambulance trust across the country

has one of these critical pieces of life-saving equipment.

It's a Combat Application Tourniquet,

or CAT.

Paramedics used the tourniquets to save lives

during the Alton Towers roller-coaster disaster.

This was one of the worst accidents ever on a theme park ride,

leaving 16 people injured - including Leah Washington,

whose left leg was badly crushed in the accident.

Because I was so injured on the ride,

I needed their skills to save my life, really.

So, I was literally just bleeding to death

and these tourniquets helped stop the bleeding.

The main artery in Leah's leg was completely severed

in the accident.

X-rays taken at the time show where paramedics had to apply

two CAT tourniquets to stop her from bleeding to death.

You can see on one of the pictures of my left thigh

how much pressure they're actually putting onto my leg.

There's two darker shades,

and that's where the two tourniquets were,

and it's quite shocking, really, when you look at how tight it is.

It looks simple,

but the Combat Application Tourniquet

has a patented design that makes it reliable

and simple to use in an emergency.

The tourniquets are made by Fenton Pharmaceuticals.

Managing director Graham Hill showed us how they work.

Here we have simulated gunshot wound to the thigh,

and applying the tourniquet is easy.

Take the tourniquet, put it on above the point of bleeding.

Tighten up.

Put through the buckle.

And then tighten the windlass

as required until the bleeding stops.

The tourniquets can be bought online by first aiders,

mountaineers and machine operators -

in fact, anyone who might need one

in their emergency medical kit.

And they're used by paramedics across the country

to save the lives of people injured in road accidents.

Genuine tourniquets are rigorously tested

and designed to be strong.

A tourniquet is not a "I might put this on."

It's, "I need to put this on or my casualty will die,"

and, therefore, it has to work first time, every time.

Since being introduced,

the tourniquets have sold in their thousands,

but now there are fakes on the market.

I was at a trade show and I was approached by a Chinese gentleman

and he said, "I've got something on my booth that I'd like to show you."

And he very proudly showed me

a very poor copy of the CAT tourniquet

and tried to sell it to me.

The tourniquet on offer was a fake version

of the genuine patented Combat Application Tourniquet

and was even being sold under the trademarked CAT name.

It did have a CE mark on it.

When I challenged the Chinese gentleman

about the CE mark,

he said, "Yes, that stands for Chinese export."

The CE mark is a safety mark

that shows a product complies with European safety legislation.

But the CE mark on the fake CAT tourniquet was also fake,

put on to fool buyers into thinking the tourniquet

had been safety tested.

I couldn't be more concerned about the fact

that there are fake CAT tourniquets out there.

Nobody is going to use a CAT tourniquet

unless they really need to in extremeness,

and that is not the time to have a device fail.

Genuine CAT tourniquets have been engineered

to withstand the extreme pressure they're put under

when they're fully tightened to stop blood loss.

Pull it through, apply the Velcro

and then turn the windlass very, very tight.

On the real tourniquet,

it's designed to flex a certain amount

so that it won't break.

But how do the fake tourniquets hold up in an emergency?

The risk of the windlass bar breaking here on the fake...

There you go. You can see how easy that was to break.

Andy Collen is a consultant paramedic

with over 20 years' experience in the ambulance service,

during which time, he's saved the lives of dozens

of serious trauma victims.

Patients that are badly injured,

blood loss is one of the major causes of death.

So, of course, you have blood in your body.

It's best to keep that blood inside your body.

Devices like the tourniquet help us to do that.

We showed Andy how a fake tourniquet

might perform in an emergency situation.

Wow. The handle snaps very easily on the fake one.

That's really quite alarming.

The last thing you want to have happen

to your patient is equipment fail, particularly if that failure

can lead to a really bad outcome for patients.

So, yeah, I'm pretty stunned and shocked with what I've seen,

and I really hope that we don't see these fake products

out there on the streets.

Fake tourniquets like these are available for sale online.

At Fenton Pharmaceuticals,

it's Andrew Saunders' job to scour the internet

and identify the fakes before anyone gets hurt.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Seven of the ten tourniquets for sale on this site are fake.

And you can tell by the price.

They're somewhat cheaper than the genuine article.

But fakes aren't just being sold in small batches online.

During filming,

Fenton Pharmaceuticals made an astonishing discovery.

Fake tourniquets had penetrated the NHS supply chain,

potentially putting hundreds of lives at risk.

One of my colleagues had a meeting with the Scottish NHS,

the Special Operations Response Team,

and this particular tourniquet was brought out

and my colleague immediately saw it and said, "That is a fake CAT."

The Scottish NHS team had inadvertently bought

2,000 fake tourniquets.

Paramedics could've gone out in ambulances equipped

with fake life-saving equipment.

You can just imagine the scene where their response vehicles

are driving round, they get called to a job,

they go to work to save the life

and the device breaks and the patient dies.

Fenton Pharmaceuticals was concerned about other fake tourniquets

being out there, and so they issued a press release

urging organisations to check

whether their Combat Application Tourniquets

were for real.

The response was shocking.

We very quickly started receiving phone calls

from a number of organisations who have purchased fake CATs

and issued them to their staff.

The National Ambulance Service of Ireland and ERS Medical,

one of the largest independent ambulance services in the country

supplying vehicles and staff to the NHS,

both inadvertently bought fake, noncompliant CAT tourniquets

which could've ended up in ambulances.

Graham Hill showed us some samples that have been sent in.

As soon as we received these,

we were able to verify very, very quickly that they were fake.

You can actually see quite easily that they're all different.

ERS Medical told us...

They say...

All those who bought fake CAT tourniquets

have recalled and replaced them.

No patients have been affected,

but Graham fears more fakes may still be out there.

This will break under any serious pressure,

and if these were all over the UK in ambulances,

then potentially that's a life lost.

I'll have a go.

Life lost.

The trade in counterfeit and illegal cigarettes in this country

is estimated to cost the government

more than £2 billion in lost revenue,

and the battle between the criminals and HM Revenue & Customs

is going on every day.

Fake Britain has been to Manchester

on a special HMRC operation

to discover the extraordinary lengths the fakers will go to

to hide their illegal stashes and carry on their trade.

This morning, a major operation is underway

to crack down on sellers of fake cigarettes.

Andy Millican from HMRC is leading the operation.

The area that we're visiting today

has often been described as the counterfeit capital of the UK.

Lots of the agencies have had

problems over the last few years, including HMRC.

We've got intelligence to indicate

that there are illicit sales of tobacco

in and around the area.

Andy's team already knows

the length that sellers of fake cigarettes will go to

to conceal their illegal merchandise.

The bottom of wheelie bins, fake cupboards,

and that's the reason that we brought the dog with us today.

Hopefully, with the dog,

he's going to sniff out all these ingenious hiding places.

Today, the team has information there's a new type of hiding place

for fake cigarettes - one they've never seen before -

and it's somewhere in this car park.

They think that cars are being used like mobile safes -

out of sight, securely locked and quickly movable.

If there's any trouble, they can be driven away

with the fake goods safely inside.

The tobacco dog is looking for indicators of tobacco products.

He's methodically going around the car park

to check every single vehicle,

and we'll see what they turn up when officers get to them

and actually get into the vehicles and search them.

And it's not long before the dogs sniff out something of interest.

The tobacco dog has indicated that there's probably products in there.

There's another one just further down.

With a number of cars now under suspicion,

it's time to see what's behind closed doors.

Finally, their efforts are rewarded.

So, this is the car that was indicated by the search dog.

There is a quantity of cigarettes in there.

There's also a quantity of cannabis that we found in the boot,

along with dealer bags,

so I suspect that the person's using this

to store the drugs and the ciggies in, yeah.

It appears this car is more than just a run around for its owner.

My colleagues have just found an example here.

Two packets of what we suspect to be illicit tobacco products

which will be non-duty paid.

This is kind of representative

and a sample of the type of illicit tobacco product

that HMRC is interested in today.

The car park is being used as a stock room

for nearby shops where the fake cigarettes are being sold.

In one of the shops,

the team has found even more suspected fakes.

Packet of Mayfair here. Probably counterfeit. That's L&M.

We suspect that... Well, that's not for the UK market. Simple as that.

Fake cigarettes may contain

even more dangerous chemicals than genuine ones,

and some don't self extinguish,

meaning they could cause house fires.

Many fakes look so convincing that they can be hard to identify,

but having seen so many over the years,

Andy knows what to look for.

It's the markings, really. You can see by some of the print.

We'll get those formally checked when we get back to the office.

Back in the car park, the tobacco dogs have found another vehicle

thought to contain tobacco.

We've gained access to the boot, and there, as you can see,

looks to be a substantial amount of hand-rolling tobacco,

which probably, we suspect, is counterfeit.

I don't know how many tens and tens of packets are in there.

So, that's obviously going to be seized.

When the car has been fully searched,

the enormous size of the haul becomes clear.

And nearby, the officers have spotted a green van parked up

that they'd like to take a closer look at.

Stand back.

This unassuming vehicle is actually a heavily-fortified mobile safe.

It's the most secure the officers have seen so far.

Just like a real safe, very hard to crack.

As you can see, we're trying to gain entry to it at the minute.

So, what we're just doing is we're just going to call

for some assistance and make sure we get entry to it.

The owner of the vehicle clearly doesn't want anyone getting inside.

-Someone else want a go?

-LAUGHTER

After a battle with the door,

the van is eventually forced to give up its secrets,

and it's clear why it was so securely locked.

So, what we've got here, opening this,

is what we suspect to be counterfeit, illicit tobaccos.

Obviously, several thousand in there.

There's two of these,

which we've just extracted from the back of this van

that was clearly reinforced

to prevent HMRC officers gaining easy access to it.

The van was being used to store a huge number and variety

of different tobacco products.

-HE WHISTLES

-Jeepers.

Wow. Bit of a Pandora's box here.

The different fake cigarette brands just keep coming...

-Excellent.

-..and coming.

Regals, Gold Classics.

A real mix.

I don't think we've seen these before.

The team is surprised by the range of fakes they've found

and the lengths to which the criminals have gone to hide them.

Whoever's van this was, they've obviously been discerning

to make sure that we're not going to break into it easily.

I think the fact that it was reinforced says everything, really.

When you see what was in the back of the van, you can see why.

I mean, there's a substantial amount of suspected illicit tobacco here.

So, for HMRC, it's a good result.

It's clear that these criminals are making huge profits.

This is one of the vehicles that we broke into earlier,

found a substantial amount of hand-rolling tobacco in the boot.

The officers have just now finished a search of the vehicle,

but in the glove box, we've found some cash,

which is approximately £2,000,

so we're going to seize that under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

The financial gains for the fakers are a huge loss for everyone else.

These are suspected to be costing the UK economy

about £2.1 billion every single year.

But as a result of the operation that we've done here today

and the type of thing HMRC does,

we've halved the illicit trade market in recent years.

Sellers of fake cigarettes thought they could get away

with hiding their stock inside their cars, but it's backfired.

Now they'll lose not only their goods but the cars too.

And they haven't seen the last of the authorities.

Today isn't a one-off.

These type of actions by HMRC and our partners take place

all over the country week in and week out,

and we want to send a strong message to the public

that we are actively cracking down

on this kind of counterfeit and fraud.

ICE CREAM VAN MUSIC PLAYS

That is the sound of summer -

a local ice cream van announcing its arrival

for lots of hot and happy customers.

I've got mine already, and this is real.

Selling ice creams from a van can be good business,

but the vans themselves are also big business.

A new one costs around 60 grand,

so it's no surprise the fakers want a scoop of the profits.

Yes, believe it or not,

they've even been faking our beloved ice cream vans.

Have you bought your cone from a con van?

ICE CREAM VAN MUSIC PLAYS

It's a sound that transports many of us back to our childhoods -

the music from an ice cream van that will serve up a Mr Whippy,

Cornetto or whatever else takes your fancy.

Anything else?

There are now around 5,000 ice cream vans like this across the country,

putting smiles and ice cream on our faces.

But 90% of them are built by just one British company -

Whitby Morrison of Crewe.

The company was founded back in 1962 by Bryan Whitby.

From humble beginnings,

the company is now the largest manufacturer

of ice cream vans in the UK, and it employs around 50 workers.

And then on to this one, which is ready.

Whitby Morrison is a family affair,

with Bryan Whitby's son Stuart and grandson Ed now behind the wheel.

From 1960, classic British heritage,

to the modern fleet that people use today.

It's just ice cream vans - we love them.

And this is their flagship van - the Mondial.

Bristling with technology,

it has a distinctive fibreglass shell

built onto a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van chassis.

This one is due to go at the beginning of next week.

Managing Director Stuart is proud of what the company has achieved.

I joined the company in 1978,

and basically I set out to build the Rolls-Royce of ice cream vans.

That's what we're about,

and Whitby Morrison is renowned as the very best vans out there.

We just want to do simply the best.

All in all, it sounds like

a great British manufacturing success story,

and business was going brilliantly

until the day Operations Manager Ed was visited by some new customers.

60 years old.

We were contacted by a customer

suggesting that they'd like to purchase the Mondial,

our most popular model by a long, long way.

He came to see us, placed the order, and thought,

"Great. That's another one to add the schedule

"and a great opportunity to produce another fantastic van."

With a brand-new Mondial ice cream van costing over £60,000,

the customers wanted to save money

by providing their own van for Whitby Morrison

to convert into one of their own unique fibreglass designs.

They brought a Mercedes panel van for us convert,

which is a big job.

It's a fibreglass body, refrigeration,

all sorts of work involved.

And we built it, as we do,

and they came along a couple of times and checked it during build

and they took it away to Leeds.

But not long after the clients left with their new van,

Stuart and Ed began to hear some dark rumours

about the true nature of their new customers.

We were tipped off by a couple of people within the industry

saying, "You do know that these people are looking

"to purchase this van with a view to producing their own copies?"

I thought, "No. Can't be possible."

So, we approached the customer about it, invited them in for a meeting,

said, "Look, we've heard these rumours.

"We wouldn't expect that to be the case."

"Oh, no, no. We wouldn't do anything of the kind.

"We're just humble ice cream men. We just want to sell ice cream."

But soon, Ed began to receive some worrying photographs

of ice cream vans for sale on social media.

We began to receive images from various people within the industry,

and it turned out that these images posted

were a blatant copy of a Whitby Morrison van.

Whitby Morrison are all for a bit of healthy competition,

but not when it comes to the faking of their vans,

so they hired leading intellectual property lawyer Patrick Tedstone.

In our business, you see all kinds of fake manufacture undertaken,

but I don't think we'd ever seen something manufactured

as a fake as large as these ice cream vans were.

Patrick started to investigate

how vans that looked very much like Whitby Morrison vans

were being sold on social media.

The primary method that the fakers had to sell these vans

was people invited to join chatrooms

to look at vans and to place orders.

The next step was to find out where the ice cream vans

were being made, so Patrick put together a team

to track down the figures.

When we got there, we could see lots of activity -

ice cream vans coming and going and work going on.

And we were really surprised by the level of the operation.

The surveillance team kept a close eye on the premises,

hoping to gather evidence that would prove

that Whitby Morrison vans were being faked.

A car was parked across the street and fitted with hidden cameras.

But one day, the car went missing.

There was just some glass on the pavement.

We didn't know what had happened.

The car turned up four days later. It had been trashed.

The cameras were stolen. All the equipment was taken.

We don't know who damaged the car,

but it seemed like we had a real fight on our hands.

We had to be careful with what we were doing.

We had to be cautious about our approach,

but we needed more information.

Patrick's investigation team turned to photographic evidence

to continue building their case.

Fortunately, we had a private investigator on the scene

and he took some detailed photographs.

From that moment onwards,

we could tell this was an exact copy.

But how had the fakers done it?

Creating the fibreglass shell of an ice cream van

is a highly specialised job,

and Whitby Morrison have worked hard to make sure their vans are safe.

This is the beginning of the production process.

This is the fibreglass moulding workshop.

This is where all the vehicle bodies begin, lids, doors, water tanks.

Fibreglass is poured into special moulds

that give the van its final shape.

A mould can take over six months and cost tens of thousands of pounds

to develop from scratch.

It's much easier and cheaper to copy one,

even if there's no guarantee that they'll be as safe as the originals,

and that's just what the fakers did.

This is the Mondial mould that was copied by the defendants.

Every little detail was copied.

You see the veins within the side,

the recesses at the rear for the number plate,

for the lights within the roof, the space for the ventilation,

the styling features.

The fakers had copied the original Whitby Morrison design

to the nearest millimetre.

This is the most blatant example of one of the fake components.

Absolutely everything here was reproduced identically,

from the leatherette pattern to the number of diamonds

featured down the centre.

But the fakers hadn't just copied the design

of the genuine Whitby Morrison vans.

They even cashed in on the famous Whitby Morrison name.

But when you combine the copying

and you use the real manufacturer's name,

then you're giving the product cachet and value

both in the new market and in the second-hand market.

And what these defendants were doing beyond any doubt

was they were saying, "This is a Whitby Morrison van."

The fakers were doing a roaring trade,

selling the fans as fast as they could make them.

We have evidence the defendants sold at least 30 fake vans.

That equates to up to £2 million of fake vans sold.

£2 million is a huge amount of money,

even for a successful manufacturer like Whitby Morrison to bear.

It wasn't just huge financial loss

that Ed and Stuart Whitby had to contend with.

There were real concerns

about the safety of the fake vans out there.

The fibreglass panels of an original Whitby Morrison van

are rigorously safety tested.

They're made to an approved European standard.

And it was when one concerned customer contacted Whitby Morrison

that the true danger of the fake ice cream vans became apparent.

We had one van back here

that had been built by the defendants,

and the quality of workmanship was shocking.

You know, potentially a safety hazard going down the road.

Patrick finally had enough evidence to bring a High Court civil case

against the Rubani family who'd been selling the fake ice cream vans

through their company, Yorkshire Specialist Vehicles.

The judge presiding over the case wanted to see the fakery

with his own eyes.

When you looked at the vans side-by-side,

they were so obviously identical

there was no way out for the defendants.

They couldn't deny it any longer. They had to admit what they'd done.

The court ruled that Yorkshire Specialist Vehicles

had infringed the design and trademark of Whitby Morrison.

They were ordered to pay £300,000

and to return the moulds they'd used to make the fake vans.

But that didn't happen.

This is what was returned.

They told the court that the van had been stolen

and had been burned out by a third party.

All we can say is that the engine from the van had been removed

and the expensive ice cream machinery had also been removed

before it was burnt out.

We don't know what the truth was.

Since the court case,

Whitby Morrison have agreed to work with ice cream sellers

who bought fake vans by issuing them licenses

that make the vans legitimate.

They've also managed to get hold of the moulds

that were used to make the fakes.

Today, they're being destroyed to make sure no fake ice cream vans

can ever serve another ice cream.

ICE CREAM VAN MUSIC PLAYS

That's all from Fake Britain. Goodbye.