“The dodgy PCSOs” – British Crime Documentary

Two PCSOs are caught in a web of lies designed to discredit their colleague. A tip-off leads to police cracking a £2 million insurance scam and a married couple rip off thousands of concertgoers with extortionate ticket prices.

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An ordinary shift for a police officer it started out as nothing it was innocuous it was it was a little crime can quickly take an extraordinary turn a simple traffic stop went strats for within 2 minutes speed is 70 milph he’s outside the P station fighting with a

Routine case you can start off with something and it can turn into something completely different Taser Taser I from you can suddenly spiral into a serious incident then it switched he locked the door she knew that something was very very wrong here by I think we’re going

To have a DeCamp one got out for the baseball back there’s a ton of campus in the car they were lit on the Rampage sometimes the most minor crimes I was looking for a stallen quad bik found a lot more can crack major cases we were now possi looking at a serial Killer today on big little crimes a small internal investigation exposes Corruption of two serving police Community Support officers we were looking at a concerted effort to ruin a man’s life a few reports of dodgy ticket sales reveals a massive multi-million pound criminal Enterprise they were responsible for selling tens of thousands of tickets

Using hundreds of different identities but first a common vehicle theft uncovers a family of forsters who stop at nothing to line their pockets detective Sergeant Andy Cullen knows in his job no two days are ever the same I’ve always said always expect the unexpected and then it’s not

Unexpected I always looked at crime as a game it is a game it’s them against us whichever way you look at it the cops against the crims and vice versa and it’s just it’s the game that you got to play little does Andy know this next

Game is about to become the longest of his career he’s investigating a series of vehicle thefts that have taken place over the last few months I was tasked with uh looking at an organized crime group who were committing burglaries across Southeast Wales particularly targeting addresses where they suspected high value racing

Bikes I’m talking anything up to 10 12,000 at that time but it isn’t just bicycles the gang are targeting during the course of one of the burglaries he committed uh quad bike had been stolen just after the latest theft some fellow officers discovered a stolen vehicle at a car repair

Workshop and he wonders if the quad bike could be there too so immediately heads to the premises it’s quite an isolated location out of the way I could see that this premises was quite a substantial Workshop maybe 10 or so cars in various bits within the work shop at the rear

Then there was a compound that was just full of crashed damaged stripped and whole vehicles and on the opposite side of the road was another compound which was also full of fanss and cars but the quad bike isn’t there over 100,000 vehicles are stolen in England and Wales every year so

Unfortunately it’s unlikely it’ll ever be found but what Andy’s about to learn turns the investigation into something something much bigger one of the search officers came up and said have a look at this what do you think of this a piece of paper it was literally a scrap of

Paper and written on it was what to say to the insurance company and I literally went timeout hold everything get everybody together I know what’s going on here from the few words on the paper Andy is certain that garage is committing insurance fraud what’s started out as an investigation into stolen vehicles has

Turned into something much more serious I was looking for a quad bike found a lot more Andy relies on his instincts and they’re rarely wrong but is going to need proof that the garage are committing insurance fraud the team meticulously searched the premises when we searched the compound I

Think there was maybe 30 m up to 4 40 vehicles from complete vehicles to parts of vehicles in the compound including parts from storing Vehicles right from a tax disc of one through the complete unit right behind me is a little bit of Woodland we also recovered number plates

From stolen cars and other vehicles where they just thrown bits and pieces into the undergrowth i’ always worked on my instincts there’s something all right with this place it just wasy that from the sheer number of stolen car parts he’s found Andy suspects that the insurance fraud is happening on a large

Scale he thinks the family running the garage are stealing cars smashing them up and then claiming for accidents that never happened it’s a scam that could be making them a huge amount of money and pushing up all our premiums he arrests the people from the garage and brings them in for questioning

Right across the board they said nothing all the interviews were no comments so we knew then early doors that we had to prove every single step of it but Andy’s trusted his Instinct so far and he isn’t about to waiver I wasn’t going to let it go it’s like give

Him a chest what are they going to do next how are we going to do it it’s that moving around you know who who’s going to make the next move then Andy finally gets the Breakthrough he desperately needs at the garage the team have discovered a potential Gold Mine of

Evidence they had installed their own CCTV on the workshop they had a camera on the back and the camera on roadside this could be a crucial find patrolling through the footage isn’t going to be an easy task he was on a 30-day Loop so we had 30

Days of 24hour CCTV to go through that was one monstrous task for somebody yeah I was the detective Sergeant yes I was the manager but we had a small team it was rolling sleeves up T later in the investigation the true scale of the fraud is revealed transpired it at that time it was probably the largest Insurance frauds investigation of its type in the UK all from one piece of Paper in our next case today a minor internal police investigation spirals into a scandal that brings shame on the Force The police are one of our most important institutions tasked with keeping us safe they make more than half a million arrests every year to ensure Law and Order is maintained but when there’s corruption on the inside who can we turn to for sergeant Lee westad working for

The police is all about being thorough I do bored quickly with normal life but I’d happily spend hours pouring through 40,000 pages of phone data just to find that one piece of evidence and one case required every ounce of his investigative Skill Le specialist units have received a seemingly routine call so the great Manchester police serious Collision investigation unit was designed to just be the force response to all fatal or life changing injury road traffic collisions but we also dealt with any serious uh breaches of police driver standards and that was

Whether it was on or off duty um and it was that section of our work that this case fell into I received a call from our Professional Standards Branch um and they had a case to refer to me where a pcsr had been seen by another pcsr driving without a driving license the

Police Community Support Officer claims his colleague only has a provisional license so shouldn’t be driving on his own it sounds like a straightforward case for Lee it should be easy really couple of witness statements interview of the suspect job job sorted but it soon becomes clear

That there could be more to this case than Lee first thought when I reviewed that statement it was quite obvious that actually there wasn’t just one witness um the male pcsr was in company with a female pcsr and they worked together and they both knew this colleague and they had both

Identified him as driving at the time so one of the first things I did was actually go out find the female pcso at work and take a statement offer Lee’s got both statements but do they match you always expect some differences um it’s just the way the human mind

Works but in this case there were quite some quite significant differences one of the significant differences was where each witness said the vehicle was at the time they made the identification and it was enough to make me want to look for some independent evidence he doesn’t have far to

Go the pcso was allegedly spotted driving without a license outside a police station the evidence from from the witness statements tells us that it is as they’re leaving the police station and waiting for the gate to rise that they see the vehicle with their colleague driving it as they leave the

Gate they pass the uh saxo to the right hand side and they make the identification at that point Lee puts in a request for the CCTV from the station but when the footage arrives it appears to undermine both of the pcso accounts when we compare the CCTV

Cameras we can see that when the pcsos are here and make their identification the citon saxo is over here the male PSO puts the vehicle on this part of the road which is actually here at the gate itself and the female pcso puts the vehicle on this part of the road which

Is actually a part of the road that the vehicle never travels on something isn’t adding up and Le suspicions soon grow even further it isn’t just that though we then look at the line of sight involved and it’s impossible to see that vehicle there is never an opportunity for them to misidentify their

Colleague what exactly had happened that day and why did their accounts differ so wildly from what we were seeing on the CCTV we needed to find out what had happened could what started as a minor tip off actually be something completely different Lee decides to speak to the

Officer accused of driving a legally to get his version of events he told me that he was not the driver and he had not driven that vehicle and he was also able to tell me how he left the police station when I then compared that with

The CCTV I was able to prove that his account was true and the account provided by the male and female pcsr was not true they were not in a position to identify the car even and certainly could never have identified him because he was never in it the police Community Support Officer

Who has been accused of driving without a license doesn’t even have a car and was seen walking home on the CCTV in his whole career Lee has never known anything like this I’ve had cases before where you know Witnesses make an honest mistake this could not have been

An honest mistake this was likely deliberate which is incredibly worrying that two police Comm support officers would have given a signed witness statement with deliberate lies in it it’s clear the two police Community Support officers are trying to frame their colleague but Lee has no idea why he immediately goes to

Arrest them for perverting the course of justice and when Lee gets to the house of the first one in the early hours of the morning he’s in for a surprise unusually they were at the the same address these two pcsos were not two independent witnesses that were just

Traveling home together they were two people that were actually in a romantic relationship this changes everything it looks like this couple are conspiring to frame their colleague for something he hasn’t done Lee takes a look around the house I also searched the address where the pcsos were found and from that

Address we sees numerous exhibits including mobile phones the phones are sent away for analysis in interview they both stick to their original statements and are released under investigation but soon there’s a breakthrough information from their phones is about to blow the investigation wide open there were a great deal of messages

Between the two pcsos over a long period of time and within those messages is we have discussion about the driving license offense that we were investigating and that’s not all the small investigation is quickly spiraling we’ve now uncovered phone messages between the two that not only discuss the original offense of the

License and confirm some of our suspicions but open up new lines of inquiry to potentially much bigger offended later Lee’s investigation takes a Sinister turn they then launched a attempt murder Inquiry in our next case a complaint about an overpriced concert ticket reveals a multi-million pound fraudulent Enterprise whether it’s the bright lights of theater live music Arena tours or intimate gigs people in the UK spend billions of pounds on tickets every year and where there’s demand there are

Clever Crooks waiting to rip people off we’ve all been through the struggle of trying to get a ticket at a fair price and then being left with if you really want to go an option but to perhaps pay 10 times the face value and it’s because of people like this that consumers were

Being ripped off trading standards receive dozens of reports of ticket scams every week but there was one case that landed on Mike Andrews desk he’ll never forget when this investigation first came to our attention it was just another day in the office if you like we any time we’re running a number of

Investigations um we were made aware and there was a relatively small handful of complaints from consumers who felt that they’d been ripped off because they weren’t able to buy tickets at a fair price uh or be able to get tickets at all and they also found that they were

Buying tickets from secondary websites uh where they were then at risk of actually not being able to get into the event because the tickets were Invalid when we did an initial inspection it looked like the tickets were being sold by many many different individual uals but we felt that that wasn’t necessarily the case Mike and the team suspect that complaints could all be related they think a criminal team is behind the crafty

Scam and suspect they are buying a huge amount of tickets at retail value before selling them on at massively inflated prices meaning there are fewer tickets for ordinary people to buy it face value if this is the case it’s illegal but how big is this suspected scam what we needed to establish from

The outset was to get some idea of the scale of the issue how many tickets were being sold what events were they being sold for how much were they being sold for but of course ultimately who was behind it who was responsible for selling those tickets after months of trolling through

Thousands of tickets on the websites they make a breakthrough what ultimately lay behind it was one company that was operated by two individuals but they were responsible for selling tens of thousands of tickets using hundreds of different identities their suspicions have paid off not only are the criminals buying up

Large amounts of tickets and stopping Ordinary People buying them at fair prices they’re also selling tickets they don’t even own this small case has grown from Individual complaints of dodgy ticket sales to an indust industrial scale fraud involving tens of thousands of victims now the team have established

Its one company their next task is to track down the scammers we’re able to use the information we’ve gathered IP addresses Financial details of where the tickets have been bought and sold from that enabled us to identify not only the individual’s concern but also where they lived where the business was being operated

From with names and an address in hand Mike and the team waste no time in the early morning they raid the house connected to the business so where we are now is typical of the property that the criminals were using to run their Enterprise a nice well-kept townhouse uh from the outside

Quite unsuspecting but this is where we found their operation being run from an upstairs bedroom that’s where we covered all of the computers and the phones where we recovered hundreds and hundreds of printed tickets and also the credit cards and the identities that they were using to perpetrate this massive

Fraud the two scammers are taken into custody but don’t give anything Away it’s now the it experts grueling job to search through the computers phones and Financial records to work out how they run their unscrupulous scam and it turns out they’re using the dark web an encrypted part of the internet often used by criminals so they’re hard to trace and this is kind

Of the first stage in the process of how they acquired the tickets and it’s a system FS we were able to establish that gave the towns advanced notice of when tickets were going to become available for high-profile events they then use specialist software that they’re using illegally to buy buy the tickets it

Allows you to have a series of tabs across the top so you can open up different web pages what you’re able to do is treat each of those tabs as a separate person if you like so when they hit the website the website just thought it was dozens and dozens of different

People trying to buy those tickets so it was all a very quick and automated process then the scammers put these tickets on resale websites for an extortionate price but on the left hand side here you can see a snapshot of all of the different tickets that they’ve either

Uploaded or have are due to upload tickets that have um that they’ve been paid for and sales that are complete and the numbers there give you a bit of an idea of the the sheer scale of the operation that they were running and this was just the tickets that were

Uploaded to one particular platform it’s a ruthless scam and it’s becoming clear that the volume of tickets being sold illegally is enormous this was the first time we’d come across uh a system as advanced as this A system that would automate a process at such scale and speed and achieve such a high

Degree of success the scammers are running a multi-million pound operation and innocent music fans are paying the price that process took around about 6 to 9 months to fully um understand it and it wasn’t just the technology Mike and his team had to get their heads around in the raid they found multiple

Credit cards in different names but who are people linked to the cards is this operation even bigger than they think as a consumer you’ll see that usually the ticking site restricts your ability to buy maybe only four or six tickets but in order to get around that

That the criminals in this case were recruiting friends families and and some cases actually just creating completely fake identities so that they could use all of those credentials and the cards linked to Them the scale of the crime is growing the trading standards team estimate the scammers have swindled 10 million from innocent victims in Just 2 and 1/2 years profiting a huge 3.5 Million it’s taken three years of meticulous investigation but finally Mike and his team watch the two scammers go to trial this was a true Landmark case it was the first time that a company had been prosecuted for buying huge quantities of tickets and reselling them at vast

Profits this was a sad savy scam but in the end it wasn’t smart enough to outwit Mike and his team both scammers are found guilty of a number of fraud offenses the first defendant received four years imprisonment and the second defendant received 2 and a half years imprisonment what started as a minor

Complaint of buying overpriced tickets has led to the takedown of a major multi-million pound online scam there was certainly a sense of relief it was years of overcoming challenges and at various points in the investigation elements of uncertainty as to whether or not we would actually be successful but we kept going and

Ultimately the jury found them guilty which was a fantastic Achievement we’re heading back to South Wales now where a report of a stolen vehicle has spiraled into a large scale insurance fraud Investigation detective Sergeant Andy Cullen and his team are working around the clock trolling through hours of CCTV from the suspicious family run car Gam marage will it offer the proof they need to show the suspects are damaging cars themselves before claiming money through unsuspecting insurance companies quality

Of the CCTV is very good it wasn’t too grainy we were able to identify Vehicles quite clearly we able to identify people quite clearly and one piece of footage in particular makes for startling viewing several employees are gathered around vehicles in the workshop yard we got the forklift Tru being driven out and

Positioned in the rear yard Landover discoveries parked out the back here and they’re bringing it in and they’re just lining it all Up you can see there’s so much damage been done to the front of the vehicle there but they spend a little bit of time now trying to increase the the Damage they’ve launched the Land Rover into the forklift truck for the second time and they just reversing back for the third and final time and this one actually activates the hazard warning lights on the Land Rover and shifts the forklift track considerably further than the previous two collisions

Had and we’ve just got them having a look now at uh how good they work has been for the last 10 minutes clearly they were ins satisfied with the the visual damage that have been done to the vehicle so they have a go with it let’s give it a kick and have

A go with a what appears to be a crowbar of some sort and pull the headlamp unit out they then did a manual activation of the airbags by pulling them out to the dashboard to make it look as if the vehicle been in a serious Collision that activated the airbag

And he knew from the second he was handed the scrap of paper at the garage with the words what to say to the insurance company that this was an insurance fraud and now he’s got the proof and modus operand was to damage vehicles or have a damaged vehicle and

Then say he’s been in the Collision it’s that simple it’s an enormous breakthrough the family are receiving insurance money for accidents that have simply never happened but he needs to know how widespread this is just how many people are involved in the scam he contacts accident management companies around the

Country they act as the middlemen between the insurance providers and the person claiming in this case the garage we went to those companies and seized all the documentary evidence that we could from them in respect of all of the claims that they had processed we then had to also visit and obtain

Statements and further evidence from virtually every insurance company in the country to back up the claims that have gone from the a management companies to the insurance companies we had hundreds of thousands of pages of documentary evidence 71 claims have been processed that are linked to the workshop

For damage to Vehicles as well as personal injury to the drivers and he knows they’re fraudulent but he needs to be able to prove it in court before the insurance companies paid out they came round to look at the damage to the cars could this help Andy’s investigation the insurance companies

Had taking photographs of vehicles when they were assessed and then through mathematics and physics showing that no that damage could not have happened in that way despite the insurance companies unsuspectingly paying out on them months earlier experts are now saying the damage could not have been caused by the

Accidents the garage claimed had happened added to the CCTV this proves that there is widespread fraud taking place at the garage but Andy needs to be able to individually link his suspects to the scam and he turns his attention to their social media accounts from an investigation point of view social media

Is an absolute Gold Mine always has been and it always will be because people will always tell you their entire lives on a social media account the family members had claimed to be involved in accidents and received thousands of pounds in personal injury payouts but none of these collisions

Appeared on social media which was a significant point for us an awful lot of the people involved had active social media and were posting their daily lives but then it would be a claim for a crash where the BMW’s being smashed up and there’s not a word of it

On social media but at the same time they’re telling you what they’re having for their breakfast dinner tea and supper Andy digs deeper into one person he suspects of making fraudulent claims and the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle start to fall into place and then there’s another photograph in

Front of the pyramids in Egypt they were using the money from the claims to finance their their Lifestyles with holidays it just happened that the cost of that holiday was pretty much the same as a claim that they put in not long before it the team have found evidence of

Nearly 200 claims they think are fraudulent and the huge scale of the crime is quickly becoming apparent we could see that it started off with the people running the garage themselves and then building it out building out and roping in friends and family and colleagues and friends of

Friends and a lot of people ultimately got dragged into it just through greed Andy and his team’s tenacity has paid off they know that 158 people have made fraudulent claims in the last 2 years getting thousands of pounds in payouts for accidents that never happened these people were trying to

Make out they’ve been seriously injured and they weren’t that’s very very frustrating it takes away from the people who have been genuinely injured through no fault of their own or through a genuine accident and have their whole lives changed because of it on top of that you’ve got these

People are are making claims for false collisions that never happened that has a massive Financial impact and that has a massive impact on everybody in society who is trying to lead a normal law-abiding life across the two years we could show in the region of2 million loss to the

Insurance industry and these people they were clever and that they kept themselves under the radar they were not so clever in it they were recording themselves doing it and they didn’t Bank on me walking in there and saying I know what that piece of paper means all of the 158 people

Including five members of the same family are taken to court and sentenced to over 60 years combined for their roles in the large scale Fraud what began as a straightforward investigation into stolen vehicles has spiraled to uncover a massive crime transpired at that time it was probably the largest Insurance frauds investigation of its type in the UK all from one piece of paper for Randy it shows insurance fraud is anything but a victimless

Crime I pay for my car insurance my house insurance and every other form of insurance the criminal activities had a direct impact on everybody it was totally unbelievable totally excessive and greed was the root cause of it All it’s time to wrap up our final case over in Manchester where a suspected motoring offense has exposed Corruption of two serving officers Sergeant Lee westad and his team are working every hour Under the Sun to try to unpick a web of Deceit and lies two serving police Community

Support officers have made false allegations against their colleague who is also a pcso the unscrupulous pair have been arrested and their mobile seized and the phone evidence reveals there’s more to this than meets the eye the messages were important because they established that the two pcsos were in a

Relationship and that is important when we’re considering their evidence that up until that point we assumed was independent evidence and the messages between the lovers throw up more worrying evidence it looks like the pair are also making allegations about someone else we recover an image from the phone

Of the maale pcsr sent to the female pcsr showing a picture of a letter from the driver and vehicle licensing agency and that relates to a report that’s been made by the maale pcsr reporting another mail for medical reasons to the DBL saying that they’re not fit to drive so

When we reviewed the image of the dvla letter we were surprised to see that the person concerned in that letter was actually the ex partner of the female pcso the person that the male pcso was now in the relationship with so he had reported her ex partner to the

Dvla the new couple are trying to get the woman’s ex-boyfriend’s driving license taken off him for medical reasons that simply aren’t true and it doesn’t stop there Lee makes another very concerning Discovery the male PCS SCE pH had been in regular contact with the charity Crim Stoppers and that was really interesting because

There are established procedures in place police staff do not need to contact crimes Stoppers they can submit intelligence this is very worrying a serving officer should know they can go direct to their manager to report a crime Lee needs to know why the male pcso contacted Crim Stoppers so we

Looked at all the intelligence information that been sent to GMP within a certain time period and then sought to cross reference that information with anyone that we thought connected to either of these two pcsos this led us to uncover a particular intelligence report that had been submitted and that related

To a hit and run Collision where an on duty uh female pcso had been struck by a vehicle and the vehicle had failed to stop the contact with Crim Stoppers said a deliberate attempt had been made on a police Community Support officer’s life the male pcso who makes the call claims

That the officer who had been hit had not been the intended target he says the person responsible is the ex- partner of his girlfriend and that she was the intended victim this massive case of mistaken identity had allegedly taken place which had left an innocent member of Staff in hospital

The real Target was the female PSO now in danger of her life because the hit and run itself was genuine police have to assume the information Supply to Crim Stoppers is too clearly the officers took that incredibly seriously they’ve been out warned the female pcso that her life was

At risk and they then launched a attempt murder inquiry which saw them obtain a warrant and attend at the ex partner’s address with a view to arresting him the case is rapidly turning into something much more serious what began as a small internal investigation has become an attempted murder

Case these two parallel investigations that up until this point didn’t know each other existed we were able then to link the two together Lee brings the female pcso ex-boyfriend who has now been accused of attempted murder in for interview he denied any involvement he provided his

Location his Albi at the time his Alibi checks out the man couldn’t have committed the hit and run and at that point the suspect and the attempted murder became my Victim the two pcsos have falsely accused two different people of crimes they haven’t committed first the pcso they accused of driving without a

License and now the female officer’s ex-boyfriend who they’ve accused of attempted murder it’s a complex investigation Lee needs to gather enough evidence to charge the unscrupulous pair he looks into their computer records when they were on shift there were also additional offenses under the computer misuse act

That related solely to the male pcso and his access to GMP computer systems we can see that the male pcso has been accessing intelligence records on the ex partner we can see that they’ve been submitting intelligence reports on the ex partner the number of offenses is growing by the minute it’s clear there

Is a concerted effort to frame their colleague and the woman’s ex-boyfriend for offenses they have never committed Lee gathers all of the phone data pulling this all together and always sitting in the background like a running commentary are the text messages from those phones messages are exchanged the dvla is discussed the license

Allegation outside the police station is discussed and importantly the hidden run is discussed we can see a pattern and that pattern is that not only are they trying to fool the police and Crim Stoppers but they’re trying to fool their family and friends they’re building this fiction

And that for me sealed what we were looking at we were looking at a concerted effort to ruin a man’s life Lee’s got everything he needs he brings the two police Community Support officers back into to be interviewed again the charges were misconduct in a public office and that related to

Contacting the dvla and perverting the course of justice and related to framing for want of a better word um the female PCS O’s ex partner for an attempted murder and during the interviews they were challenged with all the evidence that we’ gathered the lovers stick to their original story and deny everything but

As Lee arrives at court there is one final twist to this worrying Tale on the first day of the trial at Crown Court both psos changed their pleas to guilty the male pcsr was sentenced to 19 months imprisonment the female pcsr um she was sentenced to 16 months imprisonment in a

Young offenders Institute they were then dismissed from greater Manchester police and will never return what started as a minor internal complaint has led to the unraveling of an extraordinary scheme of deception and has exposed Corruption of two serving officers thanks to Lee’s tenacity the pcso accused of driving without a

License was cleared and is back at work and he knows he got the right result for the second victim too one of the things that I take away from this case is that I met that victim and he was utterly satisfied that we had done exactly what

Any member of the public would expect the police to do in those circumstances we’d found the answers we’d put the people in front of the court and they’d face Justice and I think that could only be mared as a Success join us again on big little crimes when everyday policing I notic that it was a left undri car and it just stood out as being wrong uncovers extraordinary crimes as soon as she got an opportunity she jumped out of the car and she was away on her toes and cracks

Major cases when we work together we can take out serious Criminality