Confessions of a Police Constable (14 page)

‘Honey?' my girlfriend called out questioningly, having come home to find my shoes in the hallway. ‘Shouldn't you be at work already?'

My eyes, which had been closed in a gentle slumber, were instantly wide open. The title screen of
The Fellowship of the Ring
stared back at me from the television across the room. How long since the film ended? I glanced up at the notoriously inaccurate clock on my wall, before leaping to my feet.

I was still half asleep when I grabbed my jacket and started towards the door.

‘I fell asleep on the sofa,' I explained to my girlfriend, and quickly kissed her goodbye.

‘There's a parcel for you,' she said, and handed me a large envelope.

‘Thanks,' I replied, and was out the door.

As a motorcyclist, I'm normally a huge champion of ATGATT – All The Gear, All The Time – but in this case, there simply wasn't time. I was already half an hour into my shift, and I had a ten-minute ride between me and the police station. My phone rang – before even looking I knew it was the shift sergeant.

I answered.

‘Sorry, sarge – I fell asleep – about to jump on the bike – be there in five,' I shouted, stringing my words together unintelligibly, as I violently tried to force my left foot into my right motorbike boot.

‘Make it fifteen minutes, Matt, and get here in one piece without a speeding ticket,' the skipper replied, sensibly.

‘Yes, yes,' I answered, already slipping into my on-duty radio protocol.

When you are transmitting on the police radios, the first half-second of voice is sometimes cut off, so for short messages you repeat yourself to ensure you're being heard. During a car chase, it's never ‘left', always ‘left, left'. When you're confirming something, it's either ‘affirmative' or ‘yes, yes'. I've even heard a motorbike copper transmit ‘oh shit, oh shit'.

I made it to work, and discovered that all the cars had gone out already and the front office was staffed, so there wasn't a lot I could do. I decided to stop in on Custody to say hello to the skippers, before wandering down to the writing room to check my email and deal with any outstanding CRIS
⁴¹
messages.

As I made it to the writing room, I found myself face-to-face with a couple of the Scene of Crime Officers
⁴²
. I greeted them with a wave, and as I did, discovered I that the envelope from that morning was still tucked in my pocket.

Taking a seat at one of the few spare computers, I opened the envelope. As I peeked inside, I remembered that I had ordered some new equipment: four very fast, very expensive memory cards for my video camera. Excellent; it had taken the best part of a month for them to arrive.

‘That's some professional kit you've got there,' one of the Scene of Crime Officers said. I looked up and saw an old friend, Trev.

‘Where'd you buy them?' Trev asked.

‘EBay – got a great deal.'

‘Oh. Better make sure they aren't fakes, then.'

I looked down at the cards and shrugged. They looked genuine enough to me. The blister packs were sealed shut. The pack had metallic printing on it. It all looked above board.

‘How can I tell?' I asked, and pulled one of the packs out to take a closer look.

‘It's not easy,' Trev said. ‘But we come across a load of 'em that are forgeries. They look perfectly above board – some of the fakes even find their way into high-end photography stores.'

‘So, er, what's the difference between a forged card and a real one?'

As I looked closer at the envelope, I noticed that the parcel was sent from China. That would explain why it took so long for the cards to arrive, but it seemed unfair: the eBay seller had said he was based in London.

‘They're generally less reliable, and a hell of a lot slower. Sometimes frauds take a 1GB card and change the electronics so your camera thinks it's a 16GB card. The first time you try it, it works, but any photos you write to the card after the first 1GB get overwritten. Other times they are sizes of the same capacity, but they won't be as high quality or the speed as they should be. Sometimes, it can be really hard to tell.'

‘Can you have a look?' I asked him. Trev shrugged, nodded, and took one of the cards from me. He peeled it out of the blister pack.

‘Looks real enough,' he said. ‘Can I look at another one?'

I passed him the whole padded envelope of cards, and he took the next one out of the blister pack. He examined them both closely and compared the packaging. After that he held the cards up next to one another. Suddenly, he made the sharp-intake-of-breath-through-the-teeth sound that should be familiar to anyone who has ever taken their car to a repair shop. It's the sound that comes before they tell you that something expensive is broken and needs to be repaired.

‘Hmmm?' I said.

‘This isn't looking good, mate,' he said, and handed me the two postage-stamp-sized memory chips. ‘Take a close look at 'em, and tell me why they might be fakes.'

Trev turned back to his computer, whilst I inspected the cards.

I looked closely at the connectors, the labels, the cards themselves. I flicked the ‘lock' switch to locked and unlocked a few times. As far as I could tell, they were completely identical, and they looked every bit as genuine as you'd expect from an authentic product.

‘I give up, man,' I said. ‘As far as I can tell, these things are legitimate.'

Trevor turned to me from his computer.

‘The serial numbers,' he said, prompting me to re-examine the cards again. I felt pretty dumb, as I still couldn't see anything wrong.

‘The two cards are identical,' I told him.

‘Mate, if there are serial numbers,' he said, ‘there's no way they should be the same, should they? That's kind of the point of a serial number, isn't it?'

I took another look. True enough, the two serial numbers were the same. I opened the last two blister packs as well. Another two cards – again, the same serial numbers.

‘I'll be damned,' I said. ‘If I had only bought a single card, I would've never known.'

‘Yup,' Trevor said. ‘They're pretty good at forging stuff, aren't they?'

Since there still wasn't anything useful I could do at the police station, I decided to find out more about my products. I telephoned the UK customer support number for SanDisk listed on the back of the blister packs. I half expected not to be connected.

‘Hey,' I said, as someone answered the phone, ‘is this SanDisk customer support?'

It was.

Some cheeky bastard had made a very high-quality copy of the memory disks I'd wanted – down to the blister pack, foil printing, hologram and even the official SanDisk contact details

I explained my situation to Gary-the-friendly-phone-support-guy, but there wasn't much he could do. He confirmed that the numbers we thought were serial numbers were, indeed, serial numbers. He agreed that there was no way that two – let alone four – cards should have the same digits.

‘That
is
a serial number we recognise,' he said, as I read it out to him. ‘But it belongs to a high-speed Compact Flash card, not an SD-sized card.'

Conclusion: I had a set of forged cards, SanDisk wanted nothing to do with them, and I had a load of storage media I couldn't trust with my photos or videos.

Over the next few weeks, I spent several hours trying to get to the bottom of things. I decided to lodge a complaint with eBay. The seller refused to take the cards back ‘because they had been opened'; eBay refused to give me a refund because ‘I had to prove that the cards were forgeries'; and PayPal helpfully concluded that: ‘The claim does not fall under PayPal's definition of significantly not-as-described and does not qualify for a refund. Your claim has been closed as you failed to provide PayPal with the requested documentation.'

It turns out that a sworn report from a Metropolitan Police Scene of Crime Officer isn't enough for PayPal: they needed ‘a statement from a professional who is an expert in the field'. The common-sense argument that four cards with identical serial numbers – a number not recognised by SanDisk – couldn't possibly be legitimate, fell on deaf ears. SanDisk were very apologetic about the case, but Gary-the-friendly-phone-support-guy informed me that they would not be able to produce a written statement that the cards were forgeries, as they had a policy not to comment on the matter.

I was, for lack of a better term, up Shit Creek with a broken outboard motor, and without the oars that common sense would have dictated I brought with me when making my way up such an unfortunately polluted waterway.

After a wave of inspiration, I picked up the phone to the fraud investigation unit, but they told me that being defrauded of a couple of hundred quid wasn't really their thing. The fraud division wasn't going to get involved unless I'd lost at least £5,000.

Damn.

I briefly considered ordering another 80 cards from eBay so that I would be above the fraud team's limit, but decided that putting myself at risk of losing five grand just so my Metropolitan Police brethren-in-arms would look into the matter would be a little bit on the extreme side, even for me.

In a last spasm of desperation, I tried to file a claim in the small claims court via Money Claim Online. They eventually issued a judgement, but when the bailiff tried to serve the papers, it turned out that the address I had for my dear friend the fraudster was in a student halls. Because the process had taken so long, school was now out for summer and he'd moved away. Predictably, he hadn't left a forwarding address.

I was at a dead end.

I had pretty much given up hope, when a few days later I happened to be in the pub with a friend of mine. This friend works as a ‘researcher' – he has fancy business cards and everything. You would never hear him call himself a private detective, but that's essentially what he is, so for the purpose of his anonymity, let's call him Sam Spade.

‘I have an idea,' Sam Spade said when I'd explained the situation. ‘Can you send me the raw source of all the emails you've had from this guy? I'll see if I can't dig something up on him.'

I did.

A few days later, Sam asked me to meet him again in the same pub.

‘I've got his address,' Sam said, tucking into his pint of Stella.

He explained, with not inconsiderable pride, how he had been able to track down my fraud: a really elaborate process, the details of which I have since forgotten. It included a lot of googling of email addresses, digging and posing as other people.

It transpired that my guy had a company set up in his name. According to the UK registrar of companies, his was registered to a post box company. With a bit of sweet-talking, Sam managed to convince the company to hand over the guy's real name and private address.

‘None of this information is admissible in court,' Sam said, refusing resolutely to give any details about
how
he had managed to convince the PO Box company to hand over the address of one of their customers.

‘I suppose I might as well go have a chat with the guy,' I said.

‘He only lives in Essex,' Sam said, happily egging me on. ‘Over in Hempstead, just outside Saffron Walden! I'll come with you if you like,' he added, with a glint in his eyes.

Sam is one of my motorcycling buddies. On our days off, we often head out to Essex; the A- and B-roads in the triangle between Epping, Cambridge and Ipswich are fantastic for a summer's-day ride, playing cat-and-mouse with each other. It's one of the glorious things about riding a powerful motorcycle: even within the speed limits, you still get a thrill as you zip past cars with the wind in your … er … helmet.

We decided to make a day of it the following weekend: a ride-out punctuated by a confrontation with the scoundrel who had defrauded me of the princely sum of two hundred and fifty Great British Pounds.

The weekend couldn't come around soon enough.

‘I've brought a video camera,' Sam said, when we pulled up at the address he had unearthed. He pointed to the kit he had mounted on his supercharged, positively obscene, more-horsepower-than-a-two-wheeled-set-of-transportation-should-ever-have Suzuki.

‘Aha?' I asked.

‘I'll park my bike so the camera covers the front door, and I'll “accidentally” leave the camera rolling. Don't tell him you're a copper; just confront him. You did bring your memory cards, didn't you?' he asked.

I nodded my reply before taking my helmet off. Since we were on a ‘spirited' ride, I was definitely fully ATGATT this time: I was wearing my steel-reinforced motorcycle boots and my leather motorcycle suit. Underneath, I had my chest protector and a turtleback back protector as well. Covered from neck to toes in cowhide and Kevlar, I felt even more secure than I would have in my police-issue Metvest.

Confrontation? No problem.

While Sam repositioned his bike, I grabbed the memory cards, their blister packs and the envelope from the tank bag on my motorcycle.

At the door, I pressed the white button on the frame – a little tune could be heard from inside. Someone opened the door. It was a red-headed man. He was young – I guessed about 20 years old.

‘Can I help you?' he asked the leather-clad apparition on his doorstep.

‘Maybe you can,' I replied.

‘Are you Zhipeng?' I asked, though I had already guessed (correctly) that this young man with his thick Birmingham accent probably wasn't.

‘Naw,' he laughed. ‘Do I look like a Zhipeng? His English name is Chip. I'll get him for you.'

He turned away from the door, but then turned back quickly, having apparently had an idea.

‘Who shall I say is calling?' he asked, casually.

My mind raced. If I said
my
name, Chip might recognise it, and would possibly not come to the door …