These brazen scammers need more than a slap on the wrist
This is soft-touch
Britain. Fraud: How They Steal Your Bank Account (iTV) detailed the scams that crooks use to siphon off millions of pounds from our credit and debit cards.
The documentary tried studiously not to labour the point, as if it was just a coincidence, but one factor stood out: all the gangs came from overseas. Organised criminals target Britain because sentencing is so lenient.
A mob from Ghana was seizing cashcards in the post and swaggering through London on blatant spending sprees. in one warehouse they bought seven smartscreen TVs and tried to stuff them into the back of their Mercedes; the car park CCTV caught them ramming the boxes in with their boots.
Their behaviour wasn’t just suspicious, it reeked of crime. But they knew they were immune: even if, by some improbable chance, police were called, the gang would be long gone before officers arrived.
And if they were caught, so what? The fraud squad did track them down, in the end. All but one of the crooks got a suspended sentence, with a bit of community service thrown in. Yet this is organised theft on a humungous scale, and it’s costing you a fortune: even if you’ve been lucky and your bank account hasn’t been burgled, you’re still paying for it through inflated insurance premiums.
The documentary didn’t attempt to unravel any of this. it just showed us the brazen gangsters and the exasperated police.
Two men, with the faces of thugs from central casting, flew in to heathrow from Moldova. One of them drove straight to stratfordupon-Avon, where an accomplice had installed card-skimmers in two of the cash machines. Provincial towns are a prime target, because police numbers are even more stretched than in the capital.
This time, the over-confident crooks were arrested, in the airport car park. One coolly responded ‘No comment’ to every question. ‘You’ve been in the country two minutes,’ said a despairing detective, ‘and already you know how to say, “No comment” ’
The coppers were in no doubt of the impact of the crimes. Like the phone fake tax scams uncovered so clinically this week by the Mail’s investigations Unit, these ruthless schemes leave lives in tatters.
‘The impact can be really devastating,’ said Detective super- intendent Perry stokes, ‘but these gangs stick two fingers up to the victims.’ What he didn’t add was: ‘And the courts just give them a slap on the wrist.’
Feeble sentencing was one of the themes of Duwayne Brooks’s emotional investigation into murders on the street, in Stabbed: Britain’s Knife Crime Crisis (BBC1). Duwayne saw his friend stephen Lawrence killed in a senseless attack 26 years ago, a story he helped to tell last year in BBC1’s superb trilogy stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation.
his instinct was that knife killers ought to face life imprisonment without parole, but this sensitive and thoughtful man, who is clearly still suffering the effects of trauma, recognised that every solution has to be considered.
Last year, there were 285 fatal stabbings in just England and Wales. ‘There doesn’t seem to be the will to tackle it,’ he said.
serious documentaries usually demand a professional presenter. Duwayne, an amateur, was earnest, and so emotional that he wept as he interviewed a couple whose son had been murdered coming home from the pub in a quiet village.
This deeply personal approach wouldn’t work for most reports, but it was exactly what we needed here.
FAMILIAR THEME OF THE WEEK: The students’ quiz favourite Blockbusters (Comedy Central) returned with Dara O’Briain asking the questions. The music was instantly recognisable. And yes, one naughty player did say, ‘I want a P please, Dara!’