Confessions of a Police Constable

by Matt Delito

  ‘That’s some professional kit you’ve got there,’ one of the Scene of Crime Officers said. I looked up and saw an old friend, Trev.

  ‘Where’d you buy them?’ Trev asked.

  ‘EBay – got a great deal.’

  ‘Oh. Better make sure they aren’t fakes, then.’

  I looked down at the cards and shrugged. They looked genuine enough to me. The blister packs were sealed shut. The pack had metallic printing on it. It all looked above board.

  ‘How can I tell?’ I asked, and pulled one of the packs out to take a closer look.

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Trev said. ‘But we come across a load of ’em that are forgeries. They look perfectly above board – some of the fakes even find their way into high-end photography stores.’

  ‘So, er, what’s the difference between a forged card and a real one?’

  As I looked closer at the envelope, I noticed that the parcel was sent from China. That would explain why it took so long for the cards to arrive, but it seemed unfair: the eBay seller had said he was based in London.

  ‘They’re generally less reliable, and a hell of a lot slower. Sometimes frauds take a 1GB card and change the electronics so your camera thinks it’s a 16GB card. The first time you try it, it works, but any photos you write to the card after the first 1GB get overwritten. Other times they are sizes of the same capacity, but they won’t be as high quality or the speed as they should be. Sometimes, it can be really hard to tell.’

  ‘Can you have a look?’ I asked him. Trev shrugged, nodded, and took one of the cards from me. He peeled it out of the blister pack.

  ‘Looks real enough,’ he said. ‘Can I look at another one?’

  I passed him the whole padded envelope of cards, and he took the next one out of the blister pack. He examined them both closely and compared the packaging. After that he held the cards up next to one another. Suddenly, he made the sharp-intake-of-breath-through-the-teeth sound that should be familiar to anyone who has ever taken their car to a repair shop. It’s the sound that comes before they tell you that something expensive is broken and needs to be repaired.

  ‘Hmmm?’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t looking good, mate,’ he said, and handed me the two postage-stamp-sized memory chips. ‘Take a close look at ’em, and tell me why they might be fakes.’

  Trev turned back to his computer, whilst I inspected the cards.

  I looked closely at the connectors, the labels, the cards themselves. I flicked the ‘lock’ switch to locked and unlocked a few times. As far as I could tell, they were completely identical, and they looked every bit as genuine as you’d expect from an authentic product.

  ‘I give up, man,’ I said. ‘As far as I can tell, these things are legitimate.’

  Trevor turned to me from his computer.

  ‘The serial numbers,’ he said, prompting me to re-examine the cards again. I felt pretty dumb, as I still couldn’t see anything wrong.

  ‘The two cards are identical,’ I told him.

  ‘Mate, if there are serial numbers,’ he said, ‘there’s no way they should be the same, should they? That’s kind of the point of a serial number, isn’t it?’

  I took another look. True enough, the two serial numbers were the same. I opened the last two blister packs as well. Another two cards – again, the same serial numbers.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ I said. ‘If I had only bought a single card, I would’ve never known.’

  ‘Yup,’ Trevor said. ‘They’re pretty good at forging stuff, aren’t they?’

  Since there still wasn’t anything useful I could do at the police station, I decided to find out more about my products. I telephoned the UK customer support number for SanDisk listed on the back of the blister packs. I half expected not to be connected.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, as someone answered the phone, ‘is this SanDisk customer support?’

  It was.

  Some cheeky bastard had made a very high-quality copy of the memory disks I’d wanted – down to the blister pack, foil printing, hologram and even the official SanDisk contact details

  I explained my situation to Gary-the-friendly-phone-support-guy, but there wasn’t much he could do. He confirmed that the numbers we thought were serial numbers were, indeed, serial numbers. He agreed that there was no way that two – let alone four – cards should have the same digits.

  ‘That is a serial number we recognise,’ he said, as I read it out to him. ‘But it belongs to a high-speed Compact Flash card, not an SD-sized card.’

  Conclusion: I had a set of forged cards, SanDisk wanted nothing to do with them, and I had a load of storage media I couldn’t trust with my photos or videos.

  Over the next few weeks, I spent several hours trying to get to the bottom of things. I decided to lodge a complaint with eBay. The seller refused to take the cards back ‘because they had been opened’; eBay refused to give me a refund because ‘I had to prove that the cards were forgeries’; and PayPal helpfully concluded that: ‘The claim does not fall under PayPal’s definition of significantly not-as-described and does not qualify for a refund. Your claim has been closed as you failed to provide PayPal with the requested documentation.’

  It turns out that a sworn report from a Metropolitan Police Scene of Crime Officer isn’t enough for PayPal: they needed ‘a statement from a professional who is an expert in the field’. The common-sense argument that four cards with identical serial numbers – a number not recognised by SanDisk – couldn’t possibly be legitimate, fell on deaf ears. SanDisk were very apologetic about the case, but Gary-the-friendly-phone-support-guy informed me that they would not be able to produce a written statement that the cards were forgeries, as they had a policy not to comment on the matter.

  I was, for lack of a better term, up Shit Creek with a broken outboard motor, and without the oars that common sense would have dictated I brought with me when making my way up such an unfortunately polluted waterway.

  After a wave of inspiration, I picked up the phone to the fraud investigation unit, but they told me that being defrauded of a couple of hundred quid wasn’t really their thing. The fraud division wasn’t going to get involved unless I’d lost at least £5,000.

  Damn.

  I briefly considered ordering another 80 cards from eBay so that I would be above the fraud team’s limit, but decided that putting myself at risk of losing five grand just so my Metropolitan Police brethren-in-arms would look into the matter would be a little bit on the extreme side, even for me.

  In a last spasm of desperation, I tried to file a claim in the small claims court via Money Claim Online. They eventually issued a judgement, but when the bailiff tried to serve the papers, it turned out that the address I had for my dear friend the fraudster was in a student halls. Because the process had taken so long, school was now out for summer and he’d moved away. Predictably, he hadn’t left a forwarding address.

  I was at a dead end.

  I had pretty much given up hope, when a few days later I happened to be in the pub with a friend of mine. This friend works as a ‘researcher’ – he has fancy business cards and everything. You would never hear him call himself a private detective, but that’s essentially what he is, so for the purpose of his anonymity, let’s call him Sam Spade.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Sam Spade said when I’d explained the situation. ‘Can you send me the raw source of all the emails you’ve had from this guy? I’ll see if I can’t dig something up on him.’

  I did.

  A few days later, Sam asked me to meet him again in the same pub.

  ‘I’ve got his address,’ Sam said, tucking into his pint of Stella.

  He explained, with not inconsiderable pride, how he had been able to track down my fraud: a really elaborate process, the details of which I have since forgotten. It included a lot of googling of email addresses, digging and posing as other people.

  It transpired that my guy had a company set up in his name. According to the UK registrar of
companies, his was registered to a post box company. With a bit of sweet-talking, Sam managed to convince the company to hand over the guy’s real name and private address.

  ‘None of this information is admissible in court,’ Sam said, refusing resolutely to give any details about how he had managed to convince the PO Box company to hand over the address of one of their customers.

  ‘I suppose I might as well go have a chat with the guy,’ I said.

  ‘He only lives in Essex,’ Sam said, happily egging me on. ‘Over in Hempstead, just outside Saffron Walden! I’ll come with you if you like,’ he added, with a glint in his eyes.

  Sam is one of my motorcycling buddies. On our days off, we often head out to Essex; the A- and B-roads in the triangle between Epping, Cambridge and Ipswich are fantastic for a summer’s-day ride, playing cat-and-mouse with each other. It’s one of the glorious things about riding a powerful motorcycle: even within the speed limits, you still get a thrill as you zip past cars with the wind in your … er … helmet.

  We decided to make a day of it the following weekend: a ride-out punctuated by a confrontation with the scoundrel who had defrauded me of the princely sum of two hundred and fifty Great British Pounds.

  The weekend couldn’t come around soon enough.

  ‘I’ve brought a video camera,’ Sam said, when we pulled up at the address he had unearthed. He pointed to the kit he had mounted on his supercharged, positively obscene, more-horsepower-than-a-two-wheeled-set-of-transportation-should-ever-have Suzuki.

  ‘Aha?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll park my bike so the camera covers the front door, and I’ll “accidentally” leave the camera rolling. Don’t tell him you’re a copper; just confront him. You did bring your memory cards, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  I nodded my reply before taking my helmet off. Since we were on a ‘spirited’ ride, I was definitely fully ATGATT this time: I was wearing my steel-reinforced motorcycle boots and my leather motorcycle suit. Underneath, I had my chest protector and a turtleback back protector as well. Covered from neck to toes in cowhide and Kevlar, I felt even more secure than I would have in my police-issue Metvest.

  Confrontation? No problem.

  While Sam repositioned his bike, I grabbed the memory cards, their blister packs and the envelope from the tank bag on my motorcycle.

  At the door, I pressed the white button on the frame – a little tune could be heard from inside. Someone opened the door. It was a red-headed man. He was young – I guessed about 20 years old.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked the leather-clad apparition on his doorstep.

  ‘Maybe you can,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you Zhipeng?’ I asked, though I had already guessed (correctly) that this young man with his thick Birmingham accent probably wasn’t.

  ‘Naw,’ he laughed. ‘Do I look like a Zhipeng? His English name is Chip. I’ll get him for you.’

  He turned away from the door, but then turned back quickly, having apparently had an idea.

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ he asked, casually.

  My mind raced. If I said my name, Chip might recognise it, and would possibly not come to the door …

  ‘I’m Sam Spade,’ I answered.

  ‘Right-oh,’ the man said, and vanished inside, leaving the door open.

  Chip came to the door. He was tall, and from his colossal upper arms it was obvious he spent a larger percentage of his time than I in the gym.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, with only the slightest trace of a foreign accent; he had obviously been in the UK for a long time.

  ‘Hey,’ I began. ‘You sold me some memory cards on eBay. They are fakes, and I would like my money back, please.’

  There was a long silence. He now knew who I was and what I wanted, but I could see he was still trying to figure out how I found him.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said before quickly stepping back and starting to close the door. I moved my foot forward, and placed it in the crack before it closed. As soon as I’d done so, I realised that I’d technically committed burglary, but I wasn’t going to let him just shut me out without getting some sort of resolution.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ he said, and he opened the door again – only by a couple of inches – before slamming the heavy wooden door shut on my foot. If I had been wearing normal boots – or even my police boots – I’d have broken a couple of toes at least. Fortunately, my motorbike boots are built for brutality: they are designed to keep my feet and ankles safe in case I come off the bike in a crash. I barely even felt it.

  Chip opened the door again, and surprised me by pushing me backwards with both his hands against my chest.

  ‘You can’t prove anything,’ he said, before taking yet another step forward and pushing me again. ‘Why don’t you piss off before I call the police,’ he said.

  ‘Actually,’ I replied, with as much calmness as I could muster, ‘that sounds like a good idea. Then we can explain to them how you defrauded me of two hundred and fifty pounds. Let’s see what they say to that.’

  Chip didn’t take that very graciously at all.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he elocuted.

  Then it happened: his arm dropped down, and he took a step back. I had no idea what martial art he was trained in, but I’ve practiced enough martial arts in my time to recognise a fighting stance.

  ‘Calm down, let’s talk about this properly. I obviously know who you are, what you’ve done and where you live, and I’m not going to leave until you refund my money. There’s no need for all of this. Well done you for tricking me out of two hundred and fifty quid,’ I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm, ‘but just give it back, and I’ll be out of your hair; I won’t contact you again.’

  He shifted his position again. His legs were no longer next to each other; one was slightly behind the other. He had dropped his head down slightly and bent his knees as well.

  I knew exactly what was going to happen next, and knew I wasn’t going to enjoy it in the slightest.

  Chip was signalling his punch. Actually, ‘signalling’ would be giving him too much credit. He might as well have written, ‘I am going to punch you’ in elaborately lettered calligraphy on a postcard and handed it to me.

  Or, to put it simply, it was brutally obvious that my newfound friend was a better fraudster than he was a fighter.

  ‘You’re about to make a very stupid mistake, my friend,’ I said to him. Meanwhile, adrenaline was being pumped into my bloodstream, causing everything to drop into a bizarrely familiar slow motion.

  I knew we had a video camera pointing at us. I knew everything he was doing was being recorded. If we succeeded in getting a recording of Chip punching me, the plan would be to visit the local police station and have him arrested by the local force for assault. We would have the video and Sam’s witness statement as proof. Hopefully, in his interview, Chip would ’fess up to his fraud, and I wouldn’t have to explain how I found him. All of this was racing through my head, as Chip was moving himself into position for the now-inevitable punch.

  I promise: I had fully intended to let him punch me.

  Unfortunately, ten years of jiu-jitsu training wasn’t going to disappear that easily. I just couldn’t let him reduce my face to a bloody mess. Despite my pledge to take the hit, I felt my body disobey my brain.

  A subtle feint to the left and a very fast side-step to the right brought me close to Chip, inside the reach of his blow. He punched with full force, but I was no longer there. His fist had flown past the side of my head and grazed my left ear ever so slightly, but by this point I had already planted the palm of my left hand against his nose rather firmly. Next, my left hand slid down the arm he had tried to punch me with – his right. When it reached his wrist, my right hand came up fast, slapping him across the face. The slap is a ‘weakener’ – a punch not designed to harm or disable but to confuse. The hit worked as intended: I could feel the arm I was holding relax slightly. The ha
nd I had used to slap Chip with continued its motion down to meet its partner so that I was holding his right wrist with both of my hands and my back was now facing him. For my final move, I turned around, taking a large step backwards with my right leg, and twisting his wrist upside down. Yanking his hand, I brought him off balance.

  This was elementary, white-belt jiu-jitsu stuff. You do this particular movement in your very first jitsy class, and I have done it so many times I could do it in my sleep.

  The next step in this series of events would be to snap-kick my shin into his face, before breaking his wrist with a quick clockwise jerk, and then fracturing his elbow by stomping on it with my left shin. I decided to hold back. Securing an assault conviction wasn’t going to be easy if he hadn’t connected a single punch but came away from the altercation with a broken nose, wrist and elbow.

  Instead of causing any real damage, I gave his arm a quick yank, and he was flat on his face. I still had his wrist, and I applied enough pressure to notify him that I could break it if I chose to.

  I looked up to find Sam standing next to me, pretending to look a little bored. He bowed down and spoke into Chip’s ear.

  ‘Hey, asshole. I filmed all of that. We have it on tape that you tried to punch him in the face. Also, he’s a police officer, did you know that?’

  Chip responded with a half-sigh, half-moan.

  ‘So what’s it gonna be, Bruce Lee?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I’ll pay you! I’ll pay you!’ Chip said.

  I let go of his wrist and took a couple of steps back.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said.

  Chip vanished inside the house, and came back out a minute later holding a wad of cash. He counted up £250, and added another £20 to the stack. He held them out to me, but Sam snatched the stack and made a big show of checking each bill, muttering things about forgeries. When he finished, he looked at me and shrugged.

  ‘Looks fine to me,’ he said, adding with a grin, ‘Even the serial numbers are different.’

  ‘Are you really a cop?’ Chip asked, as we turned around to head back to our bikes.