Photocopier Lease You've Been Scammed

Millions of us are targeted in scams every year,

and whether it comes in the form of an e-mail,

a cold call or a knock at the door, they are all designed to do

one thing and one thing only - to get you to part with your cash.

Coming up - the scam that left a family facing financial ruin.

We owed 1.4 million.

And the con artist who made false claims about her healing hands.

We were extremely concerned because,

if she was treating patients for a specific injury,

then she was more likely to do more harm than good.

Well, I'm here to tell you what the con man doesn't want you to know -

how to stay one step ahead of the game and not get scammed.

Working from home with your own cottage industry can be fantastic.

There's no lengthy commute, and you keep your overheads low.

But there can be other significant advantages

to running a business from home.

Clifford and Elaine Bartlett have two grown-up children

who are both severely disabled and require full-time care.

Well done. Tip them in the bowl.

To give their children the attention and support they need,

Clifford and Elaine run their business,

producing sheet music, from home.

But with such a challenging home life, the couple have always

had to rely on people they trust to help make their business a success.

What they didn't realise was that for 20 years

they were harbouring a con man.

What's really important at the heart of any scam is that there is

a trusting relationship in place between the scammer and the victim.

Most people are very suspicious of people offering

something for nothing, but if it comes from a friend,

if it comes from somebody you've built rapport with,

then you've got the basis of a very good scam.

And the scam that targeted Clifford and Elaine

is as shocking as they come.

It's taken the couple for every penny they had.

-Do come in.

-Thank you very much.

The seeds of it were sown 20 years ago

when the couple were building up their sheet music business

hoping it would provide them with a stable income.

We don't really care, as you can see, about modern house things.

We don't spend a lot on clothes.

Motivation certainly wasn't money.

As long as we had adequate, we weren't really worried.

As long as we knew we would be able to save some for the kids.

The nature of Clifford and Elaine's business

meant a photocopier is essential,

but rather than buy one outright, they decided to lease instead.

We knew nothing about the photocopying industry.

We started with a very small firm in Cambridge, which, over the years,

was taken over, and that's when we came into contact with salesmen.

The salesman in question was Gary Carr,

and he and the couple quickly hit it off.

-How did he come across?

-Oh, he was very friendly.

He would talk about his kids and say, "Of course,

"I've got no problems compared with your situation."

And when it came to organising their photocopiers,

Carr made Clifford and Elaine feel that they were in safe hands.

-How did it work?

-He did all the leasing.

He said, "You need so-and-so..." We had to have big machines

because we had a high turnover.

"This will be a reliable machine.

"This is the price I can get it for," and he'd arrange a lease,

which would be a five-years lease.

With the photocopiers taken care of by Carr, the couple were free

to concentrate on the things that were most important to them.

A key element of a business which makes them susceptible to a scam

is just the sheer pace

at which they're operating in their daily lives.

For a lot of people who work at home,

it's very difficult to see the boundaries, isn't it?

When the kids are at home, one or other of us is with them

or in the vicinity of them. They usually need one of us around.

If the children were in the house,

then what they were doing was one concern.

If we had a rush job on, that was another concern.

Generally, we just wanted to get a machine that worked.

And Carr was able to give the couple exactly what they needed

at a price they were happy with.

He quickly became an integral part of their working life.

He'd been to the house.

He knew what we needed, and he kept us up-to-date,

because we didn't know anything about the technology.

Over the next few years Carr handled all of

Clifford and Elaine's photocopier needs

and as time went on, he became more than just a salesman.

They'll find out about the hobbies of the individual.

They may pop round to their house and get to know their children,

which then makes the victim more susceptible to new offers

that the particular salesman is coming up with.

In the olden days, you had commercial travellers who would go round

and they might stay a whole morning chatting,

having a cup of coffee or whatever.

And it was that sort of selling that he was sort of part of the family

and he came every few months.

Carr even brought presents for the couple's children

and over the next decade he became a trusted friend.

So, in 2005, when he moved to a new company, they stuck with him

and he soon told them it was time for new copiers.

"Those machines are getting old now.

"The new firm's got lots of reasons to try

"and get some new machinery in and show you what they can do.

"I can provide not three but six machines at the same price.

"That's because the machines are now much cheaper."

He also told them he would cancel the existing leases

and start new ones for them.

He would then come with a wodge of lease agreements to sign.

But unbeknown to Clifford and Elaine,

Carr, who would earn thousands in commission

for each new lease they signed, had a plan.

Often, the scammer will suggest

that we need to sign multiple agreements

or we need to sign a blank agreement,

because in case one finance company declines the finance,

we can then go straight to another.

And, sure enough, Carr began presenting the couple with

a bewildering array of leases, exploiting their trust in him.

We signed, and then he'd fill them in later

with the name of the machine that was going to come.

You were signing blank invoices?

Yes, signing a blank leasing document,

which he then filled in at his leisure.

-Would you have done that for anybody else?

-No.

Certainly not anyone we hadn't known for that length of time.

We wouldn't have bought a car in that way.

We went along with it because we trusted him.

Carr had Clifford and Elaine right where he wanted them

and was now using their challenging home life to his advantage.

As you are signing these lease agreements,

how are things in the household?

Very often only one of us was present.

We were both assuming that the other had agreed the next thing

without asking each other what was happening.

The new photocopiers arrived,

but it wasn't long before Carr was back in touch.

He started saying, "Well, some of those machines aren't performing properly.

"Let me take them out and put in a new one for you."

And new machines meant new leases, often not just one.

He was saying, "Well, I need three lots of signatures.

"I'll go to this, this and this leasing company, see which one

"will give me the best deal, and I'll tear up the rest for you."

The couple still had the same number of machines,

but they'd lost track of how many leases they'd signed

and when they went through their accounts, they got a nasty shock.

We calculated it was at least 68,000 that was going out on leases.

This was almost twice what they'd been paying before.

Unsure what was going on, the couple asked Carr

if perhaps the old leases were still active.

We started asking him why the previous leases weren't cancelled,

and he kept assuring us that they had been cancelled

and he would go straight back to the office and sort it out.

The con man will use a variety of different tactics,

all designed just to put you off the scent.

He will say, "It's probably a mistake, I'll come back to you.

"I'll find out what's gone wrong. We'll sort it out, don't worry."

The silver-tongued Carr then came back to the couple

and managed to persuade them that, in fact,

they WERE paying the right amount.

He'd give a very quick explanation

and write it all down and somehow come to the right figure.

And we'd say, "Oh, yeah, all right."

The simple fact was that Clifford and Elaine couldn't afford

to spend 68,000 a year on photocopiers!

We were finding ourselves in debt.

We'd borrowed from the family to try and keep up with these payments.

We'd used all our savings.

But Carr had the solution to their problem.

He suggested they cancel all their existing agreements

and replace them with one large loan.

We would do anything

to get back to a reasonable level of expenditure on photocopiers.

He said, "If you take out this new big lease, we can cancel and pay off

"everything else and you'll have one single monthly payment to pay out."

-This is like a consolidation.

-It's like a consolidating loan, basically.

This new loan would have to be secured

against a second property that the couple owned.

Thinking that this would reduce their monthly payments,

they went ahead. At that point, things spiralled out of control.

The new loan cost far more than promised

and, incredibly, the old leases still hadn't been cancelled.

He's responsible for this.

You could take it to his door and say, "What's happened?

"Why are we paying so much more?"

We kept saying, "Well, can you bring all the paperwork you've got

"so that we can see where this has apparently gone wrong?"

He kept promising that he would, and every time he came,

"Oh, I've left that, I haven't had time to get that."

There must be a fight going on in your mind at this stage,

because this guy has been your friend.

-Yeah.

-Really, that's what that's what he is. He's a friend for 15 years,

and your suspicions at this stage must have been huge.

We were worried to death about it at that stage.

Once again, it was Carr who appeared to come to the rescue.

He was trying to get over it by giving us moderate amounts

of money in relationship to that total, from the firm.

One way in which the scammer will just buy himself a little bit

more time or appease the victim is by making small refunds

so it looks like he's got that credibility.

It looks like he's made a call to a business, the leasing company,

and they've refunded money back, and so that alleviates that suspicion.

By refunding the couple some of their money

Carr cleverly convinced them he was on their side.

So, you were thinking, "Well, if money's coming back in the right direction,

-"there can't be anything wrong."

-Yes.

The sums coming back weren't nearly enough

to ease the couple's financial woes.

The monthly payments on their loans

were running into the tens of thousands

and they were in real trouble.

In desperation, they turned to the one person they thought could help -

Gary Carr.

He arranged a second consolidation loan for them,

and this time it was secured against their family home.

We still believed him.

We thought, "Well, if he's cancelling everything else out,

"at least we've got a property to live in," so we signed up.

This was the final solution.

That's happened a number of times, though, through the process.

-Yes, and we just kept accepting it.

-We had no idea where else to go.

After we'd all signed, we thought, "This isn't right."

It wasn't until then.

I think it's very difficult to keep this sort of a scam

going on for too long, because, ultimately,

you are putting an individual under a lot of financial stress.

It's not going to be too long before you sit back and think,

"Well, OK, I've had enough of the excuses.

"What's really happening here?

"It's really time to call in some help to investigate."

Clifford and Elaine turned to a family friend

who helped them make sense of what had been going on.

So once you saw the paperwork, what was the clear picture?

The clear picture was our property was in hock and we had paid out

enormous sums and were doomed to do so for the next five years.

-Can you put a figure on what you've lost?

-We owed 1.4 million.

-That's just incredible.

-Yeah.

Gary Carr had taken out 40 separate lease agreements

in the couple's names

and many were for photocopiers they never even saw.

He pocketed £400,000 in commission.

And because Clifford and Elaine operated as a partnership,

not a limited company,

they were personally liable for the seven-figure debt.

They had no choice but to declare themselves bankrupt

and accept that they had lost everything they'd ever worked for.

We probably will have to work until we drop.

We have to sort out whether we can continue to live here.

I think we probably both try not to think about it and just get on.

There is some small comfort for Clifford and Elaine.

After a police investigation, Carr held up his hands

and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud.

Apart from one accomplice, it seems he operated the scam alone

and neither the photocopier manufacturers

nor the leasing firms were in any way involved.

Clifford and Elaine attended court

and saw Carr sentenced to four years and eight months in jail.

In terms of your feelings about him,

could you make sense of those at all?

No... I know his behaviour was totally despicable.

I, um... I even felt myself feeling sorry for him.

That just speaks volumes about the strength of that relationship

and how much it had influenced you during that time,

and even when someone has let you down as badly -

and he's not let you down, he's deceived you wholesale

and put you in the situation that you are now,

there's still a little bit of a bond there.

Yes, I think there probably is.

Staggering.

I've never heard of another scam

that's taken 20 years to come to fruition.

Two decades during which they formed such a strong bond with

the salesman that when they got suspicious,

Elaine and Clifford turned to him to find the answers.

Part of being a con man is pretending to be somebody else.

That can be very simple. You just change your name.

But there are those fraudsters that take it to another level,

and the stories they tell about themselves

are compelling works of fiction.

And when it comes to tall tales,

Winchester woman Tina Roberts takes some beating.

She posed as a physiotherapist and nutritionist

in scams that earned her over £1 million.

Most people we spoke to entered into her trust.

She was fairly personable and approachable

and it made the scam that much easier for her.

After receiving a string of complaints about Roberts,

police uncovered a catalogue of crime,

ranging from mortgage fraud to stealing people's card details.

There was one particular individual

where she managed to obtain from him in the region of £294,000.

That individual was businessman James.

It's not his real name, but he's been so affected by what's happened,

he's asked us to conceal his identity.

James first met Tina Roberts a decade ago when he developed

a back problem and was advised to see a physiotherapist.

Tina was a professional I always felt was very good. She got results.

She did seem to have a good knowledge.

So good, in fact, that Roberts told James

she'd been employed as a physio to the England rugby team.

Tina's claims that she was working with the international rugby team

certainly gave you an air of confidence that you were

working with somebody who was treating top athletes, and you felt

that if she was treating them, that actually then she must be good for me.

James went to Roberts on a regular basis

and, over time, they got to know each other.

She was bubbly, she was always engaging.

She wanted to talk to people. She wanted to find out about you.

She would tell you about her life and what was going on and what she

was doing in the business, so you became embroiled in a friendship.

And Roberts' business appeared to be going from strength to strength.

She told James she'd won a contract to provide nutritional supplements

to the British cycling team.

And, flushed with success, she began renovating her offices.

But then, out of the blue,

she suddenly turned to James in need of help.

She called me in tears, saying that the builders were refusing

to work unless she paid them,

and she couldn't do that because she had put all her money into stock

for the nutritional side of things,

and was there anything I could do to help?

So yes, I transferred her some money that night

to help her solve that cash flow issue.

It was to be the first of many loans.

Over a five-month period James lent Roberts the best part of £20,000,

thinking he was using his business knowledge to help a friend.

When you know a little bit about these things, it's very plausible

that a growing business would struggle from cash flow issues.

But then the requests for money grew significantly larger.

At this stage, she was asking for amounts

between £10,000 and £20,000 at a time, so fairly substantial.

Before lending that kind of money, James needed to see some paperwork.

She produced orders from the clients.

She produced delivery notices from the suppliers.

She produced lists of clients and amounts and values,

so that you'd sit and look at it and say,

anyone knowing this would say this looks like a very proper business.

Convinced by what he saw, James handed over more of his own cash.

Unbeknown to him, it was around this time

that Hampshire Police began receiving complaints about Roberts.

Several of her clients had come forward

saying she was taking unauthorised payments from their credit and debit cards.

Steve Murden led the investigation.

Tina was saying on occasions, "My card machine is not working

"so I can't take the money.

"Just leave me your details and I'll take it out later on."

There are no prizes for guessing what happened next.

Once she'd recorded the details, she was able to put it through

her machine and debit amounts to which she wasn't entitled.

Bank records confirmed the fraud,

and police now began looking at Tina Roberts very closely indeed,

starting with her claims

that she was physio to the England rugby team.

As far as the England rugby team were concerned, we contacted England RFU.

They'd never heard of her,

so we knew at an early stage that her claims were false.

She'd also lied about her involvement with the British cycling team,

but the biggest lie of all was about to come.

Astonishingly, police discovered that Tina Roberts

wasn't even a qualified physiotherapist.

We were extremely concerned,

because if she was treating patients for a specific injury,

then she was more likely to do more harm than good, and obviously,

that would have had perhaps an impact on that individual's health.

Roberts was arrested and all of her documents were seized.

Once we had access to her bank accounts,

we saw that she was heavily involved with financial institutions

as far as mortgages or loans were concerned.

Roberts had made a series of fraudulent loan applications,

again claiming she was working with the England rugby squad.

Once we started finding Tina had deceived financial institutions,

it went from a fairly small investigation

to a much larger scale investigation.

But despite the growing evidence against her,

Roberts protested her innocence.

Throughout interviews, she maintained that she'd never ever told anyone

that she was a qualified physiotherapist.

One of the documents that was put to her in interview was, in fact,

her marriage certificate, which, when she was asked to comment on it,

she declined, but it clearly showed her occupation

on her marriage certificate as a physiotherapist.

In January 2010, Roberts was charged with fraud and released on bail.

But at this stage, police weren't aware of innocent businessman James

who'd loaned Roberts almost £150,000

and wanted to know when he was going to be repaid.

When I really questioned Tina and said,

"When am I going to get some of this money back?"

she told me that she'd had issues with her bank where monies had

been paid in by British Cycling and by British Rugby,

and that a bank employee had scammed her.

Roberts also confessed to James about her arrest.

She had been wrongly accused, in her opinion, by the police,

because of a personal vendetta by someone in the police,

and that she had been questioned, but never charged for any offences.

And incredibly, she set about using it to her advantage.

She showed me bank statements with that money coming in

and the total sum of money in her bank and said

she couldn't get access to it because the police had frozen that.

But that was all due to stop very soon.

James believed Tina was a friend and wanted to help.

Over the next five months, he lent Roberts a further £150,000,

and only became suspicious

when he discussed the situation with friends.

I found through friends that they'd also lent her money

at the same period of time.

The story she was using to them was that she didn't want to ask me

for any more money because I'd done so much for her.

It was at that point in time that I realised, actually,

this wasn't all quite right.

Now seriously concerned, James began gathering his own evidence.

I started to record our conversations.

I looked at some of the details around some of the bank statements

and other things so that when I went to the police

that they had a solid case against her.

When James finally went to the police, he discovered that

he was one of scores

who'd been drawn into Tina Roberts' web of lies.

But the evidence he'd gathered was crucial for the police.

One of the documents that he was provided with by Tina was, in fact,

a false Lloyds TSB bank statement which showed that she had

a credit of just over £1.4 million.

James's evidence also proved

that Roberts had continued her fraud whilst on police bail.

Shown total disregard for the judicial process, and as a result

of that, she was arrested and we had grounds for remanding her in custody,

because we suspected and believed that she would continue to reoffend.

Roberts was put on remand and, in February 2011,

she pleaded guilty to 12 counts of fraud -

one count of obtaining property by deception,

and one count of obtaining financial advantage by deception.

She was sentenced to seven years in jail,

which was later reduced to six on appeal.

When she was finally sentenced,

part of her mitigation was that she had some form of lying disorder.

I remember the judge remarked to the defence counsel,

"How do we know she's not lying?"

With Roberts behind bars, people she'd targeted like James

were left to try and come to terms with what had happened.

When you finally realise that the person you've known for ten years

is a complete fantasist and that everything she said to you

was made up, you do question your sanity almost.

You sort of look at it and think, "Was this just me?"

For more information about the scams featured in the series, go to -

Now, before we go there's just time to tell you about

some of the latest scams out there right now.

I've come to meet an expert from the Financial Services Authority

to get the low-down on what you should be looking out for.

And today we're looking at a new kind of boiler-room scam.

Boiler rooms are normally about buying fake or worthless shares,

but here, they phone you up and offer to buy shares off you.

They're offering you a lot of money, because they're acting

for a client who wants to make a secret takeover bid

and they're willing to pay a little bit more than the market price.

They're offering you money. How do you end up paying them?

They say that to secure that deal,

you just need to pay some up-front taxes

and some up-front fees, so you hand over a few thousand pounds

to secure the deal, and then you'll never hear from them again.

If any firm cold-calls you and offers to buy or sell shares,

you should be very wary indeed.

There are plenty of legitimate and reputable brokers out there,

so make sure you do plenty of research

before handing over any cash.

Fraudsters will forever be coming up with new ways to get you

to part with your cash, but armed with a little bit of knowledge,

you could be one step ahead of them.

Stay safe. I'll see you next time.

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