Everyday over 17,000 crimes are committed in the UK.
“The victim have been shot.”
“They were getting deeper and deeper into this guy’s trap.”
“Up against brick walls and denials. We had no witnesses.”
“There were no leads, no evidence. This was going to be a mountain to climb.”
“What does it take to catch the criminals?”
“I knew that I had to be relentless to build my case.”
“An eye for detail. The blood splattering was that piece of the jigsaw.”
“And true determination.”
“I wanted to fight for to get the justice that she deserved.”
“It’s the uncovering of this one clue.”
“His DNA was found and that was a crucial break in this investigation.”
“That finally cracks the case.”
“I were guilty of this offense.”
“Putting Britain’s most dangerous criminals behind bars.”
“We will find you.”
“We will prosecute you.”
Today, how one text message hidden amongst hundreds of thousands nails a serial fraudster.
“So then the moment of proof came, then they mentioned my victim. So right there I knew that I could convict them.”
But first, a kidnapping in broad daylight. An extraordinary surveillance operation involving over 50 police officers. And the ransom call that reveals the kidnappers and frees the hostage, multi-millionaire businessman George Fregistus.
Roy Rams is commander of special operations, one of the most senior officers in the Metropolitan Police.
It falls to him to investigate this kidnap case, one of the biggest the Metropolitan Police has ever seen.
“The family were being contacted by the kidnappers and they were demanding a huge amount of money for his release.”
43-year-old George Fregistus, a Greek shipping magnate, has been abducted. His life is in danger.
“In any other investigation, you send police officers to the scene of a crime, you start interviewing witnesses, you start asking people if they had seen what happened. But in a hostage taking, in a kidnap case, in these circumstances, you can’t do any of that because the family have been told, ‘Do not involve the police.’ We can’t show that we are involved. So we have to think about, ‘How do we get all the stuff that we need to progress our investigation covertly? How do we secure a scene? How do we get to where the calls are being made without anybody seeing us? How do we do all that without raising the alarm of the kidnappers?'”
“A surveillance circle was put around the location.”
“Two officers entered the flat under the cover of darkness.”
“We managed to get a team into the home of Mr. Fregistus’ sister, where the calls were being received.”
“The demand was for 5 million pounds. The kidnappers were saying it had to be in cash and that that 5 million pounds was expected to be delivered in Geneva.”
“I’ve seen a lot of very large demands by kidnappers, but this was enormous. It’s a pile of money. I mean, the logistics literally of moving a pile of cash like that are in themselves very difficult.”
The team needs to understand George Fregistus and what makes him such a lucrative hostage.
“We knew that he ran a company called World Carriers. He was in the shipping business. We knew that he lived in a very expensive part of London. Mr. Fregistus and his family were wealthy. He was an attractive target for the kidnappers. The demand for 5 million pounds for his safe release was one of the biggest kidnap demands we’d ever received.”
High stakes indeed and in a kidnap case, every second counts.
“When you’re dealing with a kidnap, that is a dynamic crime. It’s a crime in action. And if you get that wrong, then the hostage can be killed. So there’s an enormous weight on you as an investigating officer.”
But frustratingly, Roy is already on the back foot.
“We weren’t in this from the get-go. The family have been told not to involve the police or something might happen to George and they reached out to their lawyer and they were considering, you know, what the best thing for George was. So it was 36 hours after he’d been taken that we first became involved.”
Not knowing if George Fregistus is dead or alive, there’s no time to waste.
Roy heads to the suspected location of the kidnap.
“There was no sign of disturbance at his home. Mr. Fregistus had some routine in his life. He always parked at this particular place. His house was just around the corner. So we were working on the basis that somewhere between his home and the car park, that’s where he had been taken.”
“This is Lanark Road in Maida Vale. And this is the public car park where he regularly parked his blue Lincoln Continental car. And at the beginning of the investigation, what we believed was he parked his car here and been taken and bundled into another car and driven away from here. That would have been the easiest way for the kidnappers to take him.”
“It must have been absolutely terrifying for George. We know he’s a real person. His life is now in our hands.”
With no clues found in the car park, Roy’s only lead is the phone calls to the family. He sends in trained negotiators to coach the family through their calls with the kidnappers.
“As soon as the negotiators are in, the first thing they have to do is to establish trust. They have to convince Mr. Fregistus’ family that what we’re asking them to do has got more chance of seeing their loved one released alive than what their natural instincts might tell them to do. So it’s about building trust between them and the police officers and it’s absolutely critical to the resolution of this case.”
“The first thing that we were looking for from the family was some delay. Now that sometimes goes against what they want to do. They want it over and done with very quickly. We need some time to try and identify who the kidnappers are and where Mr. Fregistus is being held.”
“Crucially, Roy needs to establish if George is still alive. So the guys who are coaching Mr. Fregistus’ family, they’re also listening to the calls. One of the most important things for us to achieve from those calls is proof of life. We often get tape recorded conversations being played to us as proof of life. Well, they’re only they’re only proof of life at that moment the recording is made. What we want to do is we want to have an interactive conversation.”
“The pressure at that point for the negotiators, for the whole team, it is enormous because you do not know whether you are genuinely negotiating for the release of a live hostage or if something’s happened to that person already and that the kidnappers just still want their money.”
Demands for the ransom are coming in several times a day. It’s incredibly stressful for the family and for Roy’s team.
“The family were fantastic. They are in a deep emotional trough. You know, this is this is her brother that’s been taken hostage. So it’s about managing them. It’s about making sure that their health and well-being is going to be good enough to withstand the immense pressure of this situation.”
“We started off at being told that the calls are coming from the London area. That’s no good for us. It’s just too big. We can’t do anything with that. The search area is just too big and they’re desperate for some kind of indication that George is safe and well.”
“We were encouraging the family to ask for proof of life and a couple of times we got recorded messages. Clearly, George was distressed and that was coming through on the telephone. But when the family was speaking to him and asking questions, there weren’t any answers. And it was quite clear that these were pre-recorded messages that were being played down the telephone. There was no way of putting a timestamp on them. They could have been taken on the day that he was taken.”
Three days in and the kidnappers are not playing ball. They keep their calls brief to avoid being traced.
“We’re pressing the the hostage negotiators to try to make the calls last longer, to get the telephone companies to reduce the area of our surveillance.”
“Day four, we’re moving over to West London. Again, it’s a vast area with hundreds of streets. The only reference point that we had on here was the place where George Fregistus was kidnapped from in the car park in Lanark Road.”
Then the team make a much-needed breakthrough as a pattern starts to emerge.
“By day seven, we’re now seeing a repeat of phone calls coming from this general area, which has enabled us to focus our surveillance operation.”
With more calls coming in, the net tightens. Roy now needs to scale up his team to find the kidnappers.
“So, the idea was to flood the area with surveillance officers just to try and see if we could see anybody suspicious on the telephone at precisely the time the calls were being received in George Francis’ sister’s home.”
“It was a long shot. I think probably at the height of this investigation, there was probably between 50 and 100 officers working on this case. You know, this is the kind of case that attracts the same level of resources as you might expect in a terrorism incident.”
“And when you have someone’s life in your hands, there’s no pressure like it. You’ve got a mental picture of who this person is. They are real to you. And you don’t switch this off. You don’t go home and cut it out. People were tired. People were working 16 hours a day. Some of them were sleeping in the office. This was a level of intensity you get in very few investigations.”
As the stakes are raised and the surveillance net closes in, will Roy find the crucial clue to lead him to George before it’s too late?
In our next case, a woman is left emotionally and financially destroyed in a fraud of the cruelest kind. The key to cracking the case would lie in one brief text message.
On a typically busy morning, DC Rebecca Mason is on her way to police HQ.
“My name is Rebecca Mason. I’m a detective constable with Surrey Police’s Economic Crime Unit.”
“These aren’t a quick investigation. It’s quite an analytical role, really. High-end frauds, money laundering, and looking at asset recovery for uh victims of crime.”
“So, I’ve been in this department a week and this job lands on my desk.”
“DC Mason, Economic Crime.”
“It’s one of the biggest romance fraud jobs that we have ever had in Surrey.”
A daughter is worried that her mom is being conned out of huge amounts of cash.
“She becomes suspicious of her mother borrowing money from her, from other family members, getting loans.”
“I think the daughter had seen a Western Union receipt in her mom’s house. And straight away you’re thinking, why is my mom paying 6,000 pounds by Western Union to somewhere in Ghana?”
Rebecca’s years of experience are telling her this has all the hallmarks of a romance fraud. She knows she must tread lightly with the victim who may feel ashamed of being taken in, but she needs her on side.
“Straight away we needed an account from our victim. We needed her to speak to us and we needed her on board cuz without her account, we didn’t have anything.”
Sadly, it’s an all too familiar tale.
“In December 2016, my victim had signed up to an online dating agency. In the course of her trying to match with potential suitors, she came across a profile of a male that she believed was called Kevin Churchill. So, they started up their online relationship, initially sticking to the dating platform, but it very quickly moved on to Skype messages, text messages between the pair. They’re speaking on the phone. The the person the other end sounds like quite a well-to-do man. So, everything is matching with the profile that they see in front of them.”
“Kevin Churchill appears to be a dreamboat. He liked uh animals. He had a dog. He came across as quite a personable, down-to-earth gentleman with a very high-end job, very well paid, had an address in Chelsea in London. But despite their 3-month relationship, they’d never actually met.”
“I could see this person didn’t exist. For my victims, on the other hand, they were getting deeper and deeper into this guy’s trap.”
“I had this piece of paper, which is an online dating profile of my alleged suspect. The name, Kevin Churchill, age 57, and a date of birth, all of which I knew were going to be false.”
After a couple of months of declaring his undying love, Kevin Churchill starts demanding money.
“He is stating that whilst he’s abroad, his accounts are frozen. He’s got solicitor’s fees to pay, agency fees to pay, flights. He can’t access any funds, so he is relying on them. And if they loved him, they would support him and help him get back to see them so they could start this life.”
The pressure and the financial demands escalate to an eye-watering level.
“So, within 2 months, the transactions have gone from being 800 pounds, 1,000 pounds to building up to 6, 7, 8,000. 3 months down the line, they’re 200,000 pounds out of pocket.”
“I think a person behind this, not only are they clever, they’re also heartless. Cuz it is one thing to take someone’s money, but to play with someone’s emotions the way they have done, is cruel.”
“It’s an astonishing amount of money.”
Rebecca begins to follow the trail.
“It was only when I was analyzing her bank accounts that I realized she was still sending the money despite me being involved, despite me telling her it was a scam. She was clinging on to any straw that she could try and get this money back. She didn’t want to accept it herself that she had become a victim of this kind of scam.”
After weeks of investigation, there’s one thing in Rebecca’s favor.
“My victim had kept a record of every single payment she had made. Instead of looking at someone completely anonymous, I had names. I even had addresses. So, it gave me something to work off.”
Cross-referencing with the National Fraud Hotline, Rebecca’s earlier worries are confirmed. She finds dozens of other cases where Kevin Churchill was named. He’s clearly a serial criminal.
“I had about 10 other ladies. Their story was almost identical. However, there was another name used, by the name of Kevin Thompson. So, a slight deviation in the name, but the MO was identical. So, I knew then that this was bigger than I thought it was going to be.”
“When I started making the phone calls of these ladies that reported it to Action Fraud, no one else wanted to speak to me. They were too embarrassed. And these are professional women. We had doctors, accountants, people with money that felt humiliated.”
DC Mason is slowly building a catalog of evidence, but is still no closer to identifying Kevin Churchill.
“Trying to cover their tracks, and they do it well. And as the police, we’re all constantly hitting walls, constantly hitting barriers, and thinking, God, am I ever going to get to the end of this? Am I ever going to get to the end of this trail that’s going to lead me to the person that has committed this?”
What Rebecca does have are several names linked to the bank accounts where the stolen money was going. These individuals are now all suspects. They need to be arrested.
“So, we had to make sure that those warrants were executed at the same time, on the same day, to avoid anyone tipping anyone off because the material we were after could easily be deleted. Other than banking material, we were trying to find evidence of the chat. We were trying to find Kevin.”
The suspects are scattered all over the UK, so multiple police forces are brought in. Rebecca coordinates the raids from base.
“Two had already fled the country. We got half the suspects we wanted. And immediately they were interviewed and gave us that little bit more information that we potentially were after. So, straight away, I already had identified who I thought may be responsible, but I didn’t have the evidence to back that up yet.”
Rebecca is still searching for that elusive moment of proof, the clue that would connect those arrested to the name Kevin Churchill.
“Is Kevin Churchill one of the men in custody?”
“So, after the warrants were done at all the suspects’ houses and mobile phone devices seized, I then had the task of downloading those phones and reviewing the material that was on them.”
Mikael Day Day is one of those arrested, and his phone proves particularly interesting.
“And as you can see, there are endless text messages. I could see that he was a fraudster. He was messaging vulnerable people and exploiting money from them and discussing it with his friends to the point of saying, how much money have you got off so-and-so today? Or who am I speaking to today? What telephone numbers have you got for me? So, it was clear that he was up to his neck in committing fraud, but showed no remorse for it either.”
“It was almost his mentality was oh so and so won’t give me any money. Okay, next victim was one line he came out with.”
“So really I could prove that he was linked to romance fraud. I just needed something to link him to Kevin Churchill.”
10 phones and hundreds of thousands of messages scrutinized. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But then working late one night, DC Mason has the breakthrough she desperately needs.
“So then the moment of proof came. I got to phone number 11. And this message pops up. Saying Nick, how are you? I’m fine and you? And Nick’s reply what’s the Kevin Churchill email address? Did you change the password? The response was no, I didn’t change it. It’s the dog’s name. And then they mention my victim. We need to get the money from her. So right there I knew that I could convict them of the conspiracy.”
Working under various aliases including Kevin Churchill the gang managed to groom dozens of victims and extort almost a quarter of a million pounds. And now Rebecca can finally press charges.
“Now this trial was originally set to go on for 3 months. Because some of the defendants pleaded prior to the hearing, the case actually only lasted a month before the jury made their decision and found the other defendants guilty.”
“Nicholas Adeyeye and his six accomplices were sentenced to over 10 years between them for conspiracy to commit fraud and for money laundering.”
“I think what people need to remember is that fraud is not a victimless crime. People may think that just because it’s conducted online that there’s no one the other end of it, but there is. And the devastating effect that these people have on victims of fraud is life-changing. So it’s my job to bring those people to justice, to investigate a job, to find out who they are and to send them away.”
Back in West London a high-stakes kidnap case has moved into its seventh day. Commander of special operations, Roy Ram, is under intense pressure to close in on the kidnappers and recover his hostage. But his only lead is phone surveillance.
“We’re looking to see people who might be on the telephone in a car because we’ve heard background noise of streets. At the moment the call is being received in George Vergissis’s sister’s home. And importantly that it ends when that call ends. So it’s about looking for that. I mean it’s a needle in a haystack, but it was all that we had to go on. We had nothing forensic from the scene. We had no witnesses. We had nothing from our investigation. We were really relying on identifying a caller in the Paddington area who was on the telephone at the same time that we were receiving that call.”
“It’s an incredible game of chance, but by day eight a location is emerging.”
“We start to see calls being made from the Golders Green area. This is our opportunity to narrow and focus our surveillance.”
Roy has Golders Green on his radar. The target is narrowing.
“But he still needs a little bit of luck.”
“We’ve had surveillance officers on these streets for days. We’ve used pretty well every surveillance resource available to us at Scotland Yard.”
“And then we see two guys who using two mobile phones in a really suspicious way laying one over the other relaying a call.”
“That’s a breakthrough moment for us. We think yeah, we’ve got two viable suspects here. It was a real turning point in the investigation.”
Roy can’t afford to let these men out of his sight. He’s convinced he’s tantalizingly close to the moment of proof.
“So once we’ve identified these two guys, they’re too good to let go. We’ve got to stay behind them. So where they go, we go and the surveillance envelope moves with them in a really much more focused way than we’ve been able to before.”
“There’s a flat in West London that the suspects regularly visit. Could George be just meters away?”
“This Muse’s address is only about a 4-minute drive from where we believe George had been taken hostage. We’d seen two men who were behaving suspiciously. They’d been followed to these premises and we strongly suspected that they played an important part in our investigation.”
Surveillance of these men continues over the next few hours until finally Roy gets the result he’s worked so hard for.
“We’ve stayed with these guys. We’ve followed them under close surveillance to Golders Green. And they start to make a telephone call. And at the same time the surveillance officers are told that a call is being received in George Vergissis’s sister’s flat in Knightsbridge. That’s the link. The surveillance officers move in quickly, wrench open the car door, grab the phone and at that moment they are taking the call. They are speaking to George Vergissis’s sister.”
“That’s the link. This is fantastic, but this is not the moment to kick back and say well job well done. We’ve got two. We don’t know how many others are involved. And importantly we haven’t got George.”
With the men in custody Roy immediately sends officers to raid the Houldsworth Mews address.
“At that point we made the decision to hit these premises hard. Arrested one man, went in and started to search of the premises and found one more man inside. But we were very surprised that we couldn’t find George. So you know, we were beginning to get very nervous, very panicky about what was going on.”
“And then the officers discovered the cupboard opened the door and there he was under the stairs this 6 by 3 cupboard in which George Vergissis had been held for 10 days.”
“Got up and he held on to one of the armed officers that come to rescue him and just almost squeezed the life out of this guy in relief at being rescued. It was quite extraordinary.”
“The reaction from not just the family, but the negotiators who’d been with the family for 10 days was just one of pure elation, relief. There were a lot of tears. There was a bit of laughter. You know, there was this this sense that we’ve got him. It was an incredibly emotional time.”
After George’s safe return Roy is under pressure once again to build his case to secure convictions.
“It was a very long road to trial. There’d been a very thorough police investigation and the four men, two Greeks and two Frenchmen were eventually convicted of the kidnap of George after a 4-month trial at the Central Criminal Court.”
“And the gang leader one of the Greek men, a man called Constantinos Kokolios was sentenced to 25 years in prison, which was the longest sentence ever given out in the UK for an offense of kidnap. The other three men each received a 16-year prison sentences.”
“At the end of a case like this there is an immense amount of pride in what you’ve done personally, but also for your team.”
“Surveillance officer spotting somebody in the street that’s it. You know, it all turned on that.”
