Episode 10 Caught Red Handed

Thieves will steal our cars, our valuables,

just about anything they can get their hands on.

To cut down on crime and antisocial behaviour,

the police and other agencies are using new tactics

and technology where the bad guys actually get caught in the act.

Brilliant footage. Police officers love CCTV.

Local councils, shops and businesses are laying some traps of their own.

As soon as he walked into the picture, I knew who he was.

The general public, too,

can help unsuspecting crooks get their comeuppance.

-We definitely needed proof.

-You're not going to get away with.

You might as well pack up.

It made him swallow his pride. It was brilliant.

So, anyone who is up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get caught red-handed.

Today, two small businesses are ransacked. First, a jewellers.

But next, Lisa's cafe gets hit and the burglar best beware.

Lisa has turned detective and she's angry.

I've put everything I own into this business.

It's that what was making me hunt him down.

Also today, cold-hearted conmen pose as builders then

march their victims to the bank to fleece them out of thousands.

Within a month, I'd spent £22,000.

But, in Cardiff,

the roof is about to come crashing down on this criminal gang.

And, he's big, but he's not clever.

A fully-grown man steals a child's bike,

but he releases an unstoppable force.

The child's mum.

Farnworth, Lancashire.

In the middle of a night,

a raider breaks into a family-run shop to steal jewellery.

In just a few seconds, he smashes up the shop and, with it,

the owner's livelihood.

It sinks into you that everything is gone.

That's it. We're actually on our knees now.

A man is arrested and charged with the burglary,

but bailed while he awaits trial.

And, in that time there is another break-in.

Another business, another distraught owner.

Why should I work hard and you just go out and rob and think you can

take off us hard-working people at the end of the day.

As we'll see, angry cafe owner, Lisa,

launches her own investigation.

And the police provide some clever forensic science.

We're going to develop that oily footprint on the paper.

Could it possibly be the same man who ransacked Alex's shop nearby?

In Farnworth, near Bolton, Alex has a passion for reconditioning

old jewellery.

In his shop, he only sells pieces he's painstakingly restored

back to their former glory.

A lot of other jewellers and pawnbrokers,

everything that comes in, they'll just put it in a melting pot

and melt it.

We decided to put everything back to new.

We remould it, new claws where necessary, new gems,

re-plate it so nothing goes in the melting pot.

Every item of Alex's jewellery has unique value

and he usually locks each piece away when he closes up.

Except one day, there is a family emergency.

My daughter had fallen ill at school

and I was quite eager to get home to make sure she was OK.

In the rush and the haste, it was just one of those one-off times

that everything wasn't put away.

Unfortunately for Alex, there are serious consequences.

At just gone 11.30 that night,

burglars break into the rear of his shop.

They raid the till in a back room.

But there's no alarm sounding.

It's failed

and the thieves realise they've got the store to themselves.

Over the next hour-and-a-half, they're in and out of the shop,

smashing the place up and plundering the jewellery.

It's mindless destruction.

When Alex arrives to open the shop the next morning, he's horrified.

I walked around the back and that's when I saw complete devastation.

The steel door was ripped open, there was glass everywhere.

I couldn't take it in at first. I couldn't believe it.

He calls the police and checks the footage from his CCTV camera.

It's painful to watch.

It's sickening. Unbelievable.

Totally empty.

We spent a year making and recycling all that jewellery

and they've just come and emptied it out in minutes.

Soul-destroying, that.

Alex is particularly distressed when the thieves empty the drawer

containing customers jewellery brought in for repair.

A lot of the things were family heirlooms.

Obviously, you do whatever you can to replace them,

but how do you replace sentimental items like that?

Alex's case is investigated by Detective Constable Carl Chandler

of the Greater Manchester Police.

The amount of property stolen was particularly upsetting for the victim.

It was up in the region of about £40,000 worth of jewellery

stolen, which was a massive amount to that company.

It was just a nightmare for him, really.

Alex's alarm didn't go off, but at least his cameras were working.

It's panned in at the right angles, it's all focused.

It's absolutely brilliant.

The thieves don't realise Alex's infrared cameras can see them

in the dark.

I could see the guy smashing at these cabinets.

It's like, "Oh, Jesus!"

Then he turned around and a complete straight on shot.

I thought, "Got you! Surely."

As soon as I see this image here I think, that's fantastic.

The man's image is sent around the forced to see

if anybody recognises him.

It's that shot that a PCSO saw on the intelligence bulletins

and was able to make an identification.

The man is 21-year-old Timothy Nolan. He's immediately arrested.

Nolan is charged and put in custody to await trial.

It was a great relief. It was, at least that's something anyway.

But, at a later hearing, a judge rules that Nolan can be

released on bail until his case comes up, he's a free man.

While Alex tries to rebuild his business, just around the

corner, Lisa has been working hard to get her business off the ground.

She's put her heart and soul, plus all her savings,

into opening a cafe.

My cafe is my livelihood.

I borrowed money to open the business as well.

I borrowed off my family.

My family has helped me out loads to start up.

The cafe needs to succeed.

Lisa and her husband have to support four children of their own

and three they've adopted.

I've got seven children who I want to show...

You know, having a job is good.

That's all I'm trying to do, work hard for a living.

But, sadly, Lisa's about to find out

that someone wants to help make their living by stealing hers.

Early one morning, she gets a distressing call.

Her mother has arrived at the cafe to prepare food

and makes a shocking discovery.

She was like, "The shop's been robbed" and I was like,

"What do you mean the shop's been robbed? While you were in it?"

She went, "No, last night. They've come in last night."

She went, "Everything's hollow, I don't want to go in."

Lisa rushes over to check out the damage.

My display fridge was all over the floor.

Where my till was on the side was a mess

because he'd obviously just ripped it off and run with it.

All my cupboard doors were open in my kitchen. He'd really gone to town.

He'd been here for quite a while rooting about.

The thief has even taken the pictures off the wall.

Furious, Lisa is determined to try to track down the burglar herself.

I was so annoyed inside, it was that what was making me hunt him down.

And the police are also hot on the burglar's heels.

Could these footprints belong to somebody who's

crossed their path before?

Also coming up, conmen who charge thousands for shoddy work.

This is how they left an elderly woman's kitchen.

They've got no conscience, they've got no morals.

But they do have fingerprints and they've left police a handy clue.

And there's this man,

rather heartlessly stealing a little child's bike but he meets

his match when the kid's angry mum helps police to wheel him in.

But first, we're in Boston, Lincolnshire

and if dropping rubbish was an Olympic sport,

then this litterbug would be up for a gold medal.

For reasons only known to himself, the youth starts tearing up

bin bags and kicking the rubbish all over the road.

And just in case nobody can believe his stupid antics, this lad

gets out his cameraphone to record those stupid antics for posterity.

He refuses to leave the refuse alone until he's been

and emptied every bin in the street.

The pair walk off, paying no attention to the

"Litter-free Zone" sign.

But a council CCTV operator has been following their actions

and has notified the police.

Officers soon sweep up the offenders and next morning,

council workers have to sweep up the mess.

But the litter lout will be footing the bill.

He has to pay clean-up costs and a fine.

His wilful waste dispersal ends up as a waste of his own money.

Thieves and fraudsters obviously don't care who their victims

are or what effect their crimes will have on their lives.

But in some cases, that makes the police even more determined

to bring the villains to justice.

We're watching pictures from a security camera in a bank.

Two men in the queue appear to be having a friendly

chat as they wait to be served,

one in his 70s, the other in his early 20s.

They could be grandfather and grandson but they're not

and this is not a friendly chat. One of them is anything but friendly.

The older man is a victim

and the young man is a crook scamming him out of his money.

They'll go back time after time after time to get as much

money as they can and they don't care how that will leave the victim.

Money, health, they don't care.

The young man is one of a pair of criminals known to

deliberately target the elderly and vulnerable, fleecing them

out of thousands of pounds.

They, and others like them, have to be stopped.

Cardiff.

This picture shows the kitchen of an elderly woman.

It appears she's in the middle of renovations but she's not.

This has been taken after the room has been refurbished by some

doorstep conmen.

Her kitchen being removed completely and the kitchen ceiling being

torn down which is how it's remained,

she doesn't have a ceiling or a kitchen.

For this "home improvement", the woman has been charged £6,000.

She's handed over all her savings and has had to get a bank

loan to try to keep up with the conmen's demands.

They only leave when her concerned neighbour calls the police.

PC Simon Walker starts to investigate.

We spoke with the residents, quickly identified she lived alone.

She was vulnerable by her age

and she was vulnerable by her capacity, as well.

The woman thinks the so-called workmen first called round

after following her home.

They knocked the door and spoke with her on the doorstep.

Giving her false names, they quickly established a bit of rapport

and earned her trust.

Once they had their foot in the door,

they talk her into doing up the kitchen.

And we've seen how that turned out.

This is the second incident like this that has come to

light on Simon's patch.

He notices similarities between the cases that suggest this is

-the work of the same men.

-These incidents, technically, are frauds.

The common name is "rogue traders".

They'll be persistent, they've got no conscience, they've got no morals.

These men choose victims they know will be easy to deceive

and are unlikely to call the police.

People who are being targeted are vulnerable. They don't realise

they're victims or they're too embarrassed to report it.

There are cases of conmen like these

preying on vulnerable people across the country. In Northampton,

74-year-old David was targeted by a similar fraudster.

It's as if he got some sort of hold, you know?

I was tearing my hair out at night, I kept waking up in the night -

"You fool, you fool! What have you done this for?!" You know?

David is semiretired piano tuner.

Living on his own with failing eyesight,

he finds it hard to maintain his home.

And one day, he's approached by a man in the street.

I was called from across the road, there was somebody sitting in a van.

He said, "Oh, you've got a bad crack on your driveway?"

I said, "Yes, I know about that."

He quoted me...£470 or so.

It seems a reasonable price, but having gained David's trust,

the man comments on the poor state of decoration inside the house,

and offers a deal.

"If you had all your rooms decorated, if we do them all in one hit,

"I can give you a much better discount offer."

The man starts many jobs that never get finished.

He kept saying, "Well, I shall need so many more thousands up front,"

this, that, and the other.

And if David questions the work or the money, the man gets aggressive.

I suppose I was intimidated by him.

I thought, "Well, perhaps I'll just let him carry on,

"and hope that things will turn out all right in the end."

David makes several trips to the bank

to withdraw large amounts of cash, until, fortunately,

an employee at the bank who knows David becomes suspicious.

He invited me into the office and he got Trading Standards on the phone.

When the conman realises the authorities are involved,

he simply disappears,

leaving a mess and a huge hole in David's savings.

I'd spent £22,000 within a month

for work that was done shoddily and incomplete.

But for the bank employee, David could have lost everything.

Back in Cardiff, PC Simon Walker is working to stop other people

from being conned in the same way as David.

He's on the trail of a couple of men posing as builders.

They've wrecked the kitchen at the home of their latest victim

before being scared off by a neighbour.

But in this case, in their rush to run off, these men make a mistake.

The workers had left behind some paint tins and a pickaxe.

It's a breakthrough for Simon.

We were successful in obtaining a number of fingerprints

from some of those paint tins.

They're sent to the lab for analysis.

In the meantime, the same pair of conmen make a further blunder.

They approach another elderly man

and offer to replace a broken tile on his roof.

That quote was given as £25 to change that single tile.

But this time their intended victim smells a rat.

He catches them pulling off perfectly good roof tiles

and orders them to stop.

This victim was quite switched on.

They picked him out to be vulnerable,

but they picked the wrong victim here.

And what's more, the man takes photos of the conmen.

Simon and his colleagues recognise two of the men - the O'Briens -

34-year-old John and 21-year-old Michael.

Simon searches the police database to find out

if they have been involved in any other incidents.

And it turns out they have.

Michael's name is linked to a suspected fraud in a bank,

20 miles away in Bridgend. That's him there.

Suspicious staff have alerted the police because their customer

has withdrawn hundreds of pounds six days in a row.

We see him regularly in the bank.

For him to be coming in and withdrawing this money

in this manner, in these amounts, was out of character.

And they did the right thing by calling the police.

The man's being scammed out of thousands by conmen

who are charging him a small fortune to replace his garage door.

He might feel embarrassed, ashamed of what's going on,

and can't see a way out of it, so he's just going along with it.

Thanks to the sharp-eyed bank staff,

the rest of the man's savings stays saved.

The evidence is stacking up.

Better yet, the forensic results are back from the lab,

analysing paint tins that were left at the house of the woman

whose kitchen was demolished.

This one in particular we had several fingerprints.

He couldn't dispute his fingerprints were on an item

that was used in the offence and was within the household.

The O'Briens are arrested.

Both plead guilty to fraud on multiple counts.

Michael is jailed for 13 months.

John is put away for 38 months.

They were caught thanks to the combined efforts of police,

alert bank staff - among others - and the victims themselves.

Vulnerable people need to be looked after.

In these cases it's been proven.

Neighbours, family, friends, everybody needs to look out for them.

Everybody needs to look out for them.

And back in Northampton, David gets some good news, too.

The conman who cheated him out of £22,000 has also been convicted.

I'm pleased to see that they've locked him up for six years,

but the only worry I have - they haven't thrown the key away yet.

The sales pitches offered by some conmen can sound very plausible.

Anyone might fall for their patter.

So, how can we protect vulnerable relatives,

neighbours and ourselves from these fraudsters?

The first thing you should be concerned about a trader is

if they come to your door in the first place.

Reputable traders don't usually call door-to-door.

If someone is demanding cash from you there and then,

then do not give over the money.

There is no legitimate builder that would put you under that

kind of pressure or offer any kind of aggressive attitude.

Could you get their licence plate off the car or the van?

Is there an office they work at?

Have they just given you a mobile number?

If it all goes wrong, how are you going to trace them?

If you identify, or have suspicions about a rogue trader,

then contact the police or local Trading Standards,

cos you might not be the only one who's come forward, but also

you might be the person that stops somebody else becoming a victim.

Do you remember when thieves would wear stripy shirts

and carry bags with "swag" written on them?

Those were the days, eh?

And there's nothing to suggest this innocent-looking passer-by is

a thief. But hold on.

He's walking back to this garden to get a better look.

But there's nothing here, apart from this child's bike.

Surely he can't be after that(!)

Well, he is, and he's planning it like a military operation.

He wedges the gate open for a quick getaway,

then he creeps cautiously towards the bike.

Leaning towards the saddle,

he grabs the bike and makes off pretty sharpish.

What he doesn't know is that his mean-minded little crime has been

captured on the house-owner's CCTV.

The next day the angry mum puts the footage

up on the internet to see if anybody recognises him...which they do.

And after a tip-off, she catches up with him,

complete with her child's bike, and calls the police.

For this, and another offence, he's given a four-month sentence.

The only free ride he's getting is straight to jail.

Now back to Farnworth, Lancashire.

Two small businesses have been plundered by burglars.

First, Alex's jewellery store has been cleaned out.

We had absolutely nothing, and we was right back to square one again,

and had to literally start from the beginning.

21-year-old Timothy Nolan's been charged with the crime

and is out on bail, awaiting trial.

And now there's another break-in at Lisa's cafe nearby.

Detective Constable Karl Chandler is in charge of both cases.

He's seen the impact break-ins have on business owners.

People tend to think that nobody gets affected,

everybody's insured, and nobody loses but

that's not the case at all.

We go to burglaries on many occasions where

the people at the business premises - their lives have been

absolutely devastated, ruined.

Lisa, she's got a family to feed,

she's got seven children...

you know, it's...it's a massive deal.

Outraged by the break-in, Lisa is spurred into action.

I thought - "I've put everything I own into this business"

and for somebody just to come in...

and treat it like it's nothing - I wasn't having it!

So, alongside the police, Lisa turns detective.

She starts hunting for clues to track down the culprit.

I lifted my blinds up in the middle of the shop, I noticed...

a footprint which was on my work surface.

The police told me on the phone that if I find any footprints

or fingerprints to put a box over them.

The burglar smashed a window at the rear of the cafe

by climbing a pallet he'd placed against the wall.

The police collect the forensic evidence

while Lisa takes her own search to the next stage.

When I went in the backstreet to see if anything had been dropped

I noticed the shop further down had cameras up the backstreet

so I just went in on chance.

Lisa asks for a copy of the previous night's footage.

He was more than happy to help me cos all small businesses

stick together, really.

Lisa fast-forwards through the CCTV and at 3am on the recording...

bingo! She spots movement. There's a cobweb covering the camera

but Lisa can make out a hooded figure walking to the

back of her shop.

-A few minutes later he reappears.

-He's got hold of

part of my egg box and then he comes round the corner

and he throws the egg box up against the wall.

And walks over...

to the taxi rank.

To Lisa's surprise, the man jumps into a cab and it drives round

to her back door. Unbelievably, the burglar is using the

cab to cart away the stolen goods.

So he must have been...

..getting stuff out, like, me till and me pictures and

bits and bobs and the taxi driver drives off.

Lisa heads to the taxi office and asks about the man.

They tell her they're not allowed to breach customers' privacy

but word gets round and the next day a driver comes to see Lisa

with some information.

He just said, he was so sorry. He said - "It was me who took

"the lad home last night." He said, "I didn't know.

"He said he was moving house." He'd took pictures, which is plausible,

if someone's taking pictures you're not going to think

they're robbing a property.

The driver reveals where he dropped off his late-night fare.

Lisa has got the detective bug now and can't resist going to

look for herself.

Even if she does risk being spotted by the burglar.

I just thought - "It's only a street, it's not a house

"that he's given me." So I went to the street.

Me till was there in the corner, in, like, a pile of rubble.

And me empty box of eggs. So then I thought -

"Well, you've got to live local, now."

Lisa goes to the police with her discovery.

DC Karl Chandler goes straight to the taxi company

to find out more about the passenger.

He'd spoken to, er, the girl behind the counter.

She was able to identify him.

There was, also, a computer log of the journey he'd asked to take.

And the name of the man who took the taxi is very familiar.

It's Timothy Nolan.

He's supposed to be behaving himself on bail

not hiring a taxi to raid another business.

For somebody to give their own name, for a start,

is a little bit, you know, bizarre, isn't it?

SHE LAUGHS

That was the biggest mistake, that he ever, possibly could do!

Lisa's detective work has led the police to Nolan's door

and he is arrested.

But the police still need evidence to prove Nolan was

actually inside the cafe -

remember that footprint on Lisa's counter?

Police seize Nolan's shoes to find out

if they might be a match.

Forensic officer Andy Watson takes on the job.

In an investigation a footwear mark can be as useful as a fingerprint.

Andy already has an impression of the footprint

scanned into his computer. He then steps into the

suspected criminal's shoes.

What we're doing is coating the under sole of the shoe with a

very fine oil - what we're going to do...

..is take a print...

..from the shoe...

..heal-to-toe.

And using this magnetic fingerprint powder we're going to

develop that footprint on the paper.

Prints of Nolan's shoes are compared with a print taken from Lisa's cafe.

-Andy makes an important discovery.

-There is a large scratch

of the toe area of the shoe and by flicking that

image on and off on there we can see that there's a similar

image appearing at the crime scene

and that's our eureka moment, if you want to call it that.

This proves Nolan's shoe definitely made the footprint at the cafe.

In court, Nolan pleads guilty to the burglaries at Alex's jewellers

and Lisa's cafe. He is jailed for two years.

It's a good result.

It's nice to be able to go back to the victim

and say - "Look, you know, despite what's happened,

"that person is now in custody," and that their business is safe again.

Both Lisa and Alex have had to work extra hard to recover

from their ordeals, they've also increased their security.

Since I've put all me bars on and me gates, er,

which was more expense, I do feel more secure and I feel like

the property is more safe.

Everything in life is a learning curve.

And if you learn something from something

then it's not been in vain.

We've got a lot closer to a lot of the customers

because they feel for you as well, so...

I just concentrate on our... The good things and the nice people.

That's it for today, join us next time,

when police and the public

will be catching more criminals red-handed.