Comedy of the Week - It's a Fair Cop: Scam Special

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Ever had a text from a non-existent offspring? A call from someone claiming to be from your bank? Or an email from a Nigerian prince….? Cop turned comic is here to guide you through the modern world of scams.With him, as always, are his audience of sworn in deputies, who’ll help him pick his way through some true crime conundrums, as part of the BBC’s Scam Safe Week.Written and presented by Alfie Moore Script Editor: Will Ing Production Co-ordinator: Giulia Lopes Mazzu Producers: James Robinson and Carl CooperA BBC Studios Production for Radio 4

Hello, my name is Alfie Moore and welcome to It's a Fair Cop. This program is a one-off special as part of BBC Scam Safe Week. He'll still be sworn in to make the policing decisions, but instead of going through one of my real cases, we'll be looking at some of your real cases. Sitting amongst you are some real-life detectives. Now, you won't be to spot them just yet until after ten minutes when they all go outside for a roll-up.

Today, we'll be hearing of people shamelessly taking financial advantage of others, offering things that they can't deliver, and making promises that they just won't keep. We'd like to point out that this show being broadcast on Budget Day is purely coincidental. Scams vary from old-fashioned slides of hand to more sophisticated cybercrime. And some of you may be thinking, but Alfie, you don't know your techno-aurs from your virtual elbow. But don't worry, because we have some expert guests helping me navigate the very latest scamming techniques, including. From BBC One Scam Interceptors, Jim Browning, one of the UK's leading ethical hackers. And by ethical, I don't mean that his computer is powered by a wind turn.

turbine. Jim has discovered a way to turn the tables on the scam callers. We'll find out how a little bit later. Let's get you all sworn in. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. Yonick Sunshine. Your old cops for this show. When we asked our radio four listeners for their scam experiences,

many mentioned ordering things from selling sites such as eBay or Facebook marketplace, which turned out to be not as described. or never arrived at all. Sellers do sometimes make ambitious claims I've seen an eBay advert worded for sale. Genuine Jesus Sandals. Aside from dodgy sellers, it's worth noting that there are also some dodgy buyers out there.

Time to start our first real case, and this is Julie's story. She tells us that she decided to sell her iPhone 13, and she listed her on Facebook Marketplace, for 300 pounds. Someone called Grant Hughes, messaged through Facebook, and when he popped around to take a look.

He carefully inspected Julie's phone. He wanted to get it right because it was a present for his girlfriend. That's nice. Grant had a banking app on his phone, which he passed to Julie to enter her payment details, and he even suggested that she should check the money came through on her account.

It hadn't yet been credited, but it's not unusual to have a delay of a couple of hours, And so she let him leave with the phone. But the money never arrived. What criminal offence are we looking at? Audience comps, any office? Fault. Fept.

Fraud. Fraud over there. Maximum centres for fraud. Give me a number. 15 years. 10 years. 10 years, custodial. There's fraud by failing to disclose information,

fraud by false representation, and fraud by abuse of position and that's all a bit complicated. Let me explain with a simple example. Big Bad Wolf applies for a job as a carer. On the application form, he deliberately omits his middle name in order to conceal his previous convictions

for pig-related criminal damage. Thereby committing the offence of fraud by failing to disclose information. Big Wolf lands a job and gets his first. first clients. Yes, it's Grandma. Grandma hands Big Wolf her credit card and he goes off to do a shopping. He gets everything on

Grandma's list but sticks in a cheeky T-bone state for himself. As he's responsible for Grandma's care, that's fraud by abuse of position. Wolfie knows that Grandma always collects her pension the old-fashioned way at the post office so he puts on her frilly bonnet and spectacles and goes to collect the pension for his own gain. Clear case of fraud. by false representation. How I've never been snapped up by CBBC is a mystery.

The majority of fraud cases are fraud by false representation and that's exactly what our Facebook marketplace buyer is doing. Lying to Julie about his banking app payment, it's not real, it's just an image on his phone. It's now clear that Julie is a victim of crime. Audience cops, if this has happened to you, would you report it to your local police, your bank, another agency or no one at all? Who says they'd report this to the police? It's a £300,000 iPhone. Maybe 15% of this audience.

Let me speak to you. What's your name, please? My name's Sheila. My thinking was that you can report it to more than one organisation, so I thought the police and the bank. Okay, nice. I like that, Sheila, thank you. going to report it to another agency other than the police or... Action fraud. Oh. Gentleman with that, is that a goatee or a tash, sir, or a bit of both? It's a beard, thanks.

It's a beard, thanks. Okay, thank you. What's your name, please? Phil. Phil? You said action fraud, did you? Yeah, I did. Okay. Just because they're the clearinghouse for this sort of stuff and... The clearing house?

Yeah. What does that mean? means they take reports of all the fraud cases in the country and do what with them? Stick him in a bin. Well, nice to know you're a fan, Phil. We do have the national lead for action fraud in this room, Phil. No, we do.

But don't let that put you off, slacking them off. Julie reported it to the police and the crime report ended up on the desk of D.I. Duncan, Wynn. Hello, D.I. Win, can you tell us what your department does? Sure. So I head up the Thames Valley Police Central Fraud Unit, and we receive all of our cases from action fraud. And my role is to disseminate all of those cases to my teams based on proportionality, solvability and public interest.

So one of the very positive things about action fraud is that they are a clearinghouse for fraud. And so it means that anybody in the country can report to action fraud, and me as the head of fraud for Thames Valley Police only received the crimes from action fraud that relate to my force. However, members of the public can report to their local force

if there is a suspect known or the crime is happening right now or involve vulnerability. I should say that action fraud only covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I end up a big part of jobs and I have to choose which ones to give to my detectives

because as you know, if you leave detectives to choose their own jobs, they will choose the wrong ones. So that's my job. Audience cops, over to you then. You've got this investigation. What would you do first? You've got Julie. She's sold a phone.

Somebody that's arrived in person. CCTV? CCTV, where from? So some victims actually had internal CCTV in their house on ring cameras. So many victims are talking about at this point? At the initial time, we took the investigation on there were about eight offences and we ended up in total of 21 offences.

Okay. So you've got eight victims. eight potential CCTV doorbell cams. Correct. So it sounds like your office has went down and got an image of the suspect. Is that right? That's correct.

Okay. Let's leave it. Oh, yeah. The net is closing. We'll leave that dangling on a knife edge. Can you dangle on a knife edge? I don't know. Mixing my metaphors.

One of the classic scams in modern history was a Ponzi. Created by Carlo Pietro Giovanni, Guglielmo, Tabaldo, Ponzi who originally had a much shorter name but started to borrow letters from the front to tag onto the back until eventually his entire name collapsed.

Scamming is nasty if only there was a way to give them a taste of their own medicine. Now it's time to delve into the world of cybercrime with ethical hacker Jim Browning from BBC 1 scam interceptors. Jim's work exposing phone scammers has seen his YouTube channel amass

over 4 million subscribers. And I spoke to him a little earlier. Hi Jim. Hello, Alfie. Lovely to meet you. So you're known as an ethical hacker. It's a good description of what I do, as in I have ethics, I like to think I have,

and I do hack into systems. What I do is basically I let scammers try to scam me and I run the scam in reverse and I try to access their computers or whatever device you're using and I get good insights into who they are, what they are, and I report that to authority. So in that sense, I'm an ethical hacker. So, Jim, what are the basic scam techniques that you come across? I would say the most common one that probably almost everyone, if you've got a UK landline, you're bound to have heard this one and that's what's called the Robocall.

So there's this automated robotic sounding little message that appears in your phone and it'll be something like Microsoft or your bank or Amazon and there's been a suspicious payment and if this wasn't you, you press one. And I'm sure almost everyone has heard something like that before. But what I was able to do recently was to change the message that is played when they make those phone calls. So instead of, this is Amazon, there's been such and such a charge, press one. I changed it to... This is a message from scammers in India. They are pretending to be Amazon and are attempting to steal your money. You not mention that the message has been changed,

but if you would like to waste a scammers time, please press one. We're at our most vulnerable when we make an emotional. social connection with someone or something that's been offered. Even with my policing experience, I've also been tempted. As a collector of police memorabilia, I was very excited to see in an online auction Sir Robert Peel's actual original police issue taser. Speaking of emotional buy-ins, it's time for Peter's story. Like many of us, Peter was a fan of Her Majesty, the late Queen Elizabeth II, and

And two weeks after she died in 2022, he spotted a very unusual eBay listing. From someone claiming to be a senior footman at Windsor Castle selling the late Queen's Antler Walking Stick. The proceeds were to go to a cancer charity and the seller claimed to have permission of the royal family. And before you ask, no, the seller wasn't called Andrew. Let's keep it classy.

The seller was asked to provide proof of the walking stick's provenance and in response he quickly closed the account. But the police were already on the case and after inquiries with the royal household, a warrant was executed. So was a fraud, so hopefully dragged up Tower Hill. 26-year-old Drew Marshall was arrested. The police examined a suspect Marshall's computer

and found search engine inquiries about the queen and how to delete an eBay listing. He must have found. I felt like the police interview was going really well. So, you're a senior footman at Windsor Castle. No, not really. Is this a majesty of the late Queen's walking stick? No.

The royal family didn't give you permission to sell it? No. Is this a record of your personal computer search engine history connecting you to this offence? Yes. Well, I think that's good at everything. How do you plead? Not guilty.

You've got to love these people. Marcia was convicted of fraud by false representation. What do you reckon he got, audience cops? What do you think he got? A 12-month community order had to complete 40 hours unpaid work. Apparently they supplied him with a litter-picking stick that actually belonged to Richard the 3rd.

Let's get an update on the investigation where victim Julie believed that she'd successfully sold her iPhone via Facebook marketplace to a pleasant young man called Grant. So you've got some doorbell cam footage. You've got a description of this individual. What we then did is we pieced together the information from each of the witnesses and we came to the conclusion that he was arriving either by foot or an electric scooter to the addresses.

Any CCTV of the electric scooter? Yes, so then we could backtrack from that to the CCTV in the streets and then we identified a common vehicle to a number of the offences. Have we identified the offender yet, D.I. Win? We've got a good idea. So we know the registered keeper of the vehicle is a female, and we know that a female has a partner, and

that partner matches the description of our suspect. So we've got a search warrant for their address in Buckinghamshire. We carried out a search warrant. We were considering arresting the girlfriend as well. She was pregnant. He was very, very keen for his girlfriend not to be arrested, and on that basis was very

cooperative, and he was arrested interviewed and charged with the 21 offences. Wow, okay. And he was found guilty, convicted of court? He was. So one of the key identification pieces of evidence was on one of the CCTV videos in the exchange shops. He very carefully, for the first time on a hot summer's day,

was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt and had his girlfriend's name tattooed on his forearm. And what was the result of court? He was sentenced to two years imprisonment. Unfortunately, he was incarcerated at H.M. Prison Wonsworth, and so it was back home the following week. They gave me a lift and everything. Time to go back to our ethical hacker, Jim Browning. So, Jim, sometimes you're having a bit of fun with the scammers.

Well, I've used the odd what's called a soundboard. And a soundboard is basically a whole lot of clips of, say, a well-known person. and they will just have like sentences and you click a button and out of your computer speakers you'll hear whatever that star actually said so there is something called an Arnold Schwarzenegger sound aboard and I thought I could use Arnie's voice to have a chat with the scammer and see how long it possibly make the conversation and go on for well good morning yeah hi good morning sir

how are you how are you thank you Okay, I'm fine. I'm fine, thank you for asking. Nice to meet you. So can you tell me, yeah, thank you, see in here. So can you tell me, is that a laptop or a laptop? Yes. So is that a laptop or a desktop?

Yes. Okay. Yes. So I tell you some steps, you need to follow them and women get connected. Look at the keyboards. Yes. On the extreme bottom, left corner, you will see a control key. C3RL written on it, right?

Come be a little teacher, miss. Mm-hmm. I want to know what's going on, and I don't know right now. It's in many people's nature to help others. For example, where's Nikki? Hello, Nikki, you thought you were helping out a good cause? Tell us what happened. I was coming out of a coffee shop

and it was raining and outside was a big issue seller and he was standing there and he looked very forlorn and bedraggled and so I sold by a copy then felt in my pockets, I didn't have any cash. He said, don't worry, I've got a card reader so I gave him my card.

I didn't like to ask him to look at the card reader because that sounded a bit rude and he had me the card back handing me the big issue, off I went. And a couple of days later, I realised she'd attain £80. Thank you, Nicky. We're all familiar with the work of the big issue, which exists that offer homeless people

or individuals at risk of homelessness the opportunity to earn legitimate income by selling the magazine. So, Nicky's out of pocket by 80 quid, was it, Nicky? Yeah. Audious cops, then. Who are you reporting that to? Action fraud. Action fraud.

It's like we're in the time walk. Nikki, who did you report this to? I think someone told me, I told a friend, and they said, I've heard that that's happened to someone else. And so then got in touch with the police. Thank you. And it found its way, once again, to DiWin's department. So you've got this job, DIYN, fake big issue seller.

What do you do with it? I wanted to give it to one of my best detectives, but none of them are available, so... I gave it to David. Okay, so do you want to pass a mic to David? What's your role, David? I'm a detective on the central fraud unit working for my esteemed boss.

And you've picked up this job and you want to do some initial inquiries. Any suggestions? of initial inquiries to try and solve this crime, on his cops? CCTV. CCTV? Did you do that, David? Yes, CCTV was done locally. Okay.

Tracing through the cart, like, he's receiving the money, isn't it? Okay, all right. So we've got inquiries with the banks by the card payment. Thank you. What about inquiries with the local big issue? See if he's a genuine seller. Anybody going for that one? Did you make that inquiry, Dave?

That was most valuable inquiry was to go to the local big issue department, who obviously were very invested in trying to help us. And what did they tell you? There's a former big issue seller. But presumably you kept the clothing and bag? Without their consent, yes. Okay. So the banking inquiries were definitely on our radar, something we would have done.

However, this person was racking up offences very promptly. It sounds like you're going to go out and try and find him. Yeah, that's exactly it. So, yeah, we sent a number of plainclothes officers out into the lovely Oxford. Okay. So you guys went, plainclothes, sat up in cafes, in prominent locations, and waited for this offender to appear. What happened?

We got lucky first out on the plot. It's not lucky if you sat there eating bacon sandwiches, mate. I don't like it's a couple of days on that job. Sorry, go on, Matt. Yeah, so, lo and behold, he's sighted. He made us almost immediately. But fortunately, we were able to get hands on him. And was he homeless or?

No, he was not. He was a resident of slough. Okay. Which, I mean, hit the poison. Nearly then, nearly. Can I disapologise to anybody from Slau? So you've got your man in custody. What was he like in interview?

He couldn't confess to enough. It was one of the very rare occasions where you were... Did you beat him census? How did that? They were very gentle with. Catch more flies with honey. Okay. He was handed a community.

order to complete 100 hours of unpaid work and to pay an 80 pound fine well that's what he thought the magistrate's card reader said Nikki, are you happy with that sentence? No, I think probably that is quite light. And speaking of £80,000, did you get yours back? I got mine back from the bank.

But the big learner for me was I never, never, never, don't look now. Thank you, Nicky. Thank you, Nicky. A scam is a scam, is a scam. It doesn't matter if you're purporting to be a big issue seller or trying to shift £122 million with a PPE. The big issue job was a great result,

but like the Facebook Marketplace investigation, it seems that people. are unclear as to who the lead investigation agency is. To help us understand the process, we have the head of action fraud, temporary chief superintendent Amanda Wolfe. Welcome. I'm now regretting the earlier Big Bad Wolf analogy.

I was wondering when you put the two together. Amanda works for the City of London, please, which is nothing to do with the London's MEP, please, and the other good news is, your team will shortly be launching a brand new fraud reporting system. Now, full disclosure, I've been somewhat critical of action fraud, and some of the MPs of the House and Commons Justice Committee must be fans of the show

because they reported that action fraud weren't fit for purpose and should be replaced. So you've had a bit of bad press. What have been the main issues, Amanda? So main issues, poor victim journey. A really fancy way of saying when you report is really hard and it takes a long time and it's not easy to follow. Okay.

And now, for the good news, action fraud will soon be no more. There's a rebrand coming, not just a new name, but 150 million pound investment and a vastly improved service. So sell it to us, Amanda. Sell it to you. So in the new year, you will have a new service. It isn't a rebrand. It is a brand new reporting service for all of cyber crime and fraud.

it will be easier, faster, more efficient and we will be able to do much, much more with what you tell us. Okay, and what's it going to be called? It's going to be called report fraud. Report fraud, okay. And what do you say to those people in the room who don't think it's worthwhile reporting these crimes? What would you say to them?

I would say to you that every report counts. Even if we can't investigate it, we can't send it to a force for investigation. What we can do is use it as intelligence, which helps us understand how people are committing fraud. It also means that you are protecting other people by proxy because we can tell people about it and we can also prevent it from happening in the first place so we can work upstream online

with tech companies, different media platforms to stop it from happening in the first place. And the cases we've heard about today, the fraudulent Facebook buyer and the dishonest big issue seller, should those offences be reported to report fraud? Yes, absolutely. And the other important thing about that is in terms of getting money back,

even if that's the only thing that you want to happen is for you to get your money back, please still report it to us because we can also help with that. And then the information is passed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau for analysis. Yeah, not anymore, but yes, so it will go into the crime analysis service

within report fraud, so we have a whole new analysis system, which means that we can do more with it faster, but it will go through what we call a solvability matrix. And you're also ahead of the intelligence? I'm head of all of it. Okay. A very big bad wolf.

Yeah. Thank you, Amanda. So report fraud will launch in the new year covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Has anyone heard of pig butchering scams? Let's head back to Jim to hear more about the practice and how he helped take one down. It's basically a cross between a romance scam,

and an investment scam and they start off with going on to dating sites and they literally build relationships with people they will pretend to be a very glamorous man or woman and with a rich lifestyle before the inevitable questions ask well how do you get all your money why are you living such a lavish lifestyle and then they'll introduce the scam and they'll point their victims to a website which is a fake investment site and this particular one was running in the city of Dubai in United Arab Emirates and I was able to get an insight because actually somebody on the inside of that call centre reached out to me to say I don't want to be involved in this scam can you help me out and I said yes I'll expose the scam and what it ultimately led to was the police getting involved

and in just one building 2,000 people were arrested and a neighbouring building another a thousand so a very very large number great work a perfect illustration that whilst some of what jim does to waste hackers time is entertaining it can also deliver really impactful results Hollywood has romanticised scams in movies like the sting catch me if you can my second home in hove Oh, I'm sorry, they've not made that one yet. Whereas scamming is the opposite.

It's seedy, immoral, trickery, where the perpetrator wants you to feel shame and embarrassment. That's why official bodies tell us that 86% of fraud victims never report the crime. Don't be complicit in covering up the real crime figures. Embarrass the police, embarrass the politicians, the banks, the social media platforms. The shame is on them.

Not you. Be safe out there. Trust your instincts and don't be afraid to take a step back. Or in Yorkshire speak, if in doubt, do not. Goodbye. It's a Fair Cop was written and performed by Alfie Moore. With additional material by Will Ng, it was produced by James Robinson

and was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Thank you.