Episode 8

When a fire breaks out on an illegal waste site, it costs the taxpayer £500,000 in clean-up costs and unearths an operation responsible for a staggering £4 million in unpaid tax.

The Environment Agency is first alerted to a problem when two different farmers report huge amounts of refuse being stored inside sheds they’d rented out on their land. They’d both been told by the tenant that he would use the shed to store dry plastics before sending them off for recycling. But it soon becomes clear that the rubbish being dumped at the sites is not what they were expecting. It includes all kinds of garbage, tonnes being delivered at a time in huge articulated lorries.

Investigators start looking into what’s going on and discover over 200 tonnes of illegal waste. Then a fire breaks out in a neighbouring county. It’s another illegal site, and investigators discover the man renting the land is the same individual they’ve been checking up on.

In another case, a chancer takes advantage of a Home Office slip-up by creating a fake identity to fraudulently claim £350,000 in benefits. The Department for Work and Pensions first becomes suspicious when they notice a regular claimant has ticked every single box on the benefits application form. He’s claiming he needs every kind of help on offer. But when investigators look at his paperwork, they find he doesn’t have any kind of disability at all.

They also discover after the government made a mistake on his initial application – and spelled his name wrong – that he has managed to use that name to create a second identity. For years, he’s claimed a whole new set of benefits under this fake name. In total, he claimed nearly £350,000 in benefits he wasn’t entitled to.