Cars, Cops & Criminals

Big Business follows the police as they track down the organized crime networks making millions shipping stolen cars abroad and reveals how gangs steal identities to carry out the growing crime of Vehicle Insurance Fraud. Up to 20,000 luxury cars are stolen from Britain’s streets every year and illegally exported by criminal gangs in a multi-million pound business. Cyprus is one of the biggest destinations for these cars, and Big Business accompanies teams from the Metropolitan Police’s Stolen Vehicle Unit as they head to the island to track down stolen cars and teach the Cypriot police how to identify which cars have been illegally exported.

Casting the Net highlights the new technology and tactics that the police are using to catch crooks as they travel around the country. It shows the devastating effects of number plate cloning—with criminals using sophisticated, and not-so-sophisticated techniques to steal other cars’ identities—often resulting in thousands of pounds of fines and a visit from the bailiffs for the unfortunate victims.

Moving On follows the police as they use the latest technology to catch crooks breaking into the cars around the upmarket streets of Chelsea. The episode highlights the increasing problem of so called "two and one" break-ins: car security systems are now so good that criminals are increasingly breaking into houses to steal car keys, often while the occupants are at home. The episode also follows officers as they fight the rise in freight crime; with crooks targeting high-value loads being transported around the country.

Car crime in Britain today is big business and the crooks are picking on “soft targets” as the recession hits home. Cars, Cops & Criminals goes out on the road with Angus Nairn of the Central Motorway Policing Group as he chases those who will steal the loads from the back of lories and lorry drivers who illegally tamper with their tachographs to work more hours. More than 40,000 caravans go missing every year and a large percentage go out of the country never to be seen again. We follow expert insurance investigator Dave Smith, as he checks the county steam fair for stolen caravans with some devastating results for the innocent owners. Because Bob and Margaret Johnson had a tracker device fitted to their second “home” they got their caravan back, luckily for them as in it was their much-loved dog Jackie. With the Olympics coming up in 2012 the Met’s stolen vehicle squad look at the increasing problem of plant theft. In London’s east end building sites reformed crook “Pete” shows us how easy it is to steal equipment worth thousands of pounds. While elsewhere in the country farmers are losing millions of pounds worth of equipment stolen, which is stolen to order and taken to Eastern Europe. In years gone by, ram raiders were seen as a major problem in city centers but measures taken to stop those have now resulted in gangs of two-wheeled criminals who attack jewellery shops, who take only 39 seconds to make off with over one million pounds worth of jewels.

Cops from different police forces get together in Warwickshire for a massive crackdown on motorists who break the law by driving without a licence and insurance. Using a sophisticated automatic number plate recognition system connected to a special computer, police find stolen cars belonging to illegal immigrants and chemicals for making drugs. In the town of Luton, on the M1 Motorway, another team of police come across a man who has not had a driving licence for more than a year, and another individual with a counterfeit licence. As cops clamp down on the motorways, innocent motorists also come under pressure from crooks. When Andy Bird put his pride and joy, a rare silver Vauxhall Monaro, on a website for car lovers he ended up being stopped and questioned by the police about an armed robbery which had been committed while his vehicle was parked at the station car park. The crooks had stolen his number plate to replace their plates on the getaway car. A young mother from Derbyshire could not understand why she was being sent congestion charges from London area until she saw a color photograph of the car that was committing the offences, but it still wasn’t easy to prove that it was not her! As the call is made to toughen up the laws that let over 42,000 outlets supply number plates in the UK, we look at the Swedish system where there is only one supplier and they only send the plates to the address on people’s tax form

Police teams at Felixstowe and Southampton crack down on the organized criminal gangs who are exploiting loopholes in the shipping business to ship stolen luxury cars from Britain to Africa and other parts of the world.