To celebrate the last Rogue Traders of the series, we have updates on Rogues who have previously featured on the programme.
Some viewers have wanted to know why the rogues who have featured on the programme have appeared to get away with their activities. They want to know why Rogue Traders doesn't bring them to justice. Rogue Traders is here to expose them - and it is then down to police and trading standards officers to prosecute or take other appropriate action if they can. And often, they do. So, we are going to show you what happened to some of the rogues after our cameras stopped rolling.
First up is Nicky Date, a rogue who we exposed in September 2010. He collected people's rubbish, but rather than disposing of it correctly, he would roam the streets of Cardiff looking for somewhere to put it. He has been jailed for this in the past; when we had heard that he was doing it again, we called him out. You can read about him here.
On May 26th 2011, Nicky Date appeared at Cardiff Magistrates Court to get sentenced on two charges of fly tipping, one of which was a charge for tipping oil. Date received a four month suspended sentence and a two month suspended sentence, to be served consecutively. He also received a 12 month supervision order, 200 hours of unpaid work and an ASBO.
Steve Atkins from Cardiff County Council commented: "The Rogue Trader footage was used as supplementary evidence and this helped us secure a five year ASBO against Nicholas Date. Fly tipping is a major problem in Cardiff costing the city council up to £1million a year to clear up."
Our next Rogue is Gurdave Sharma from TVRC, a TV repair company which until recently was based in Birmingham. TVRC went under many different company names, posing as a local company. In 2006 Sharma was sentenced to 12 months in jail after breaching a court order designed to stop him cheating customers and he was served with a further court order. However, in 2009 we caught him back to his old tricks. You can read more about Sharma here.
Earlier this year Sharma was prosecuted again by Trading Standards, who had served the order on him in 2006. He appeared before a court in April 2011 and was jailed for 15 months for breaching that order.
Next up is LBS Enforcement Ltd, a clamping company based in Essex. They were exposed by us for intimidating behaviour and extremely large charges. You can read more about LBS here.
We caught up with one of the directors of LBS Enforcement at the time, and clamped his car. But the good news is, since then the authorities have caught up with the company, too. Ben Collins, who clamped our researcher Hannah, fellow clamper Edward Lapenna, and director Mark Stone have had their SIA vehicale immobilisation licenses taken away. They've also been given 13 week suspended jail sentences for using threatening words and behaviour when posing as debt collectors. And HMRC has won an application to have the company wound up for non-payment of taxes.
Then there's Clive Bramall of Oxford and Abingdon Washing Machine Repairs. He conned his customers into handing over money - for appliances that didn't turn up. He was featured on Rogue Traders in October 2010. You can read more about Bramall here.
Earlier this year, Oxfordshire Trading Standards charged Bramall with three counts of fraud, six counts of misleading customers by taking payment without supplying goods and one count of failing to act with professional diligence.
He pleaded guilty, received a six-week suspended jail sentence and was ordered to carry out 250 hours of unpaid work.
Next up we have brothers Abbas and Bilal Ahmed, who made a business of selling cars with hugely reduced mileages - at massively inflated prices. We were fairly sure the cars they were selling were clocked, but we needed to get them to clock a car for us.
First we had to sell them the car, then buy it back to prove, without any doubt, that they knew exactly what they were selling. The car had 128,000 miles on the clock when we sold it to them, but was showing just 47,000 when we went to buy it back. That meant they could ask £6,200 for it, and not £2,300 for which they had bought it from us. You can read the full story here.
We caught up with Abbas Ahmed when we posed as customers interested in buying our car back. Abbas tried to run away from our very own Matt Allwright but he couldn't outrun the justice system. Abbas and Bilal Ahmed were prosecuted under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (2008) for the supply of clocked cars. They both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 200 hours unpaid work. We calculated that they took half a million miles off the cars in one month - that's the distance from here to the moon and back.