Police crackdown on crime gangs exploiting migrants in £8.6 billion counterfeit trade

The police raid began when two officers heard 30 panicked Christmas shoppers trapped inside a three-storey building screaming for help from behind its narrow shuttered door.

They had been locked into the rabbit warren interior of single-room shops selling counterfeit designer clothes, trainers, watches and other Christmas gifts after the owners fled when alerted to approaching police officers by their “spotters” in the street outside.

They had brought down the shutters remotely using key fobs before police broke in under an emergency warrant “to preserve life” and rescue the 30 terrified shoppers including an elderly woman with a broken arm who had to be shepherded down a narrow set of rickety carpeted wooden stairs.

The Aladdin’s cave of cheap fake designer goods piled to the rafters uncovered by the raid is part of Britain’s counterfeit capital, a two-mile square district spanning Strangeways, which houses the Victorian prison of the same name with its iconic tower, and Cheetham Hill in Manchester.

Police estimate that the litter-strewn hotch-potch of shops, warehouses and containers accounts for half of Britain’s £8.6 billion a year trade in counterfeit goods on offer to shoppers looking for a Christmas bargain for a tenth of the price of the genuine article.

Some 33 organised crime groups are engaged in more than 150 businesses selling counterfeit fashion, illicit prescription drugs, stolen phones and electronic equipment and vapes from the two districts, a trade which is, in turn, fuelling illegal immigration, money laundering, prostitution and gang violence.

Fake Apple Airpods Pro are available for £20, rather than £250. Counterfeit Nike Air Max 95 men’s trainers are £30, not £165. A fake Moncler jacket is £100 instead of £1,300. A quilted “Chanel” handbag costs £35, rather than £4,000.

The raid was mounted as part of Operation Vulcan, aimed at shutting down the trade and launched last month by Greater Manchester Police’s (GMP) chief constable Stephen Watson. He has been feted for taking the force out of special measures with a back-to-basics approach where every crime is investigated to its fullest.

Last week, over a 24-hour period, his force answered its 999 calls within one second and 101 calls within 47 seconds, the fastest of any of the 43 police forces in England and Wales. It was previously languishing at the bottom of the league tabl.

Now he is targeting organised crime after admitting there has been a “willful blindness” that has allowed the criminal trade in counterfeit goods to flourish.

“There are some things which are tolerated on the basis that that's just the way things are and, as a result, I just don't think people sometimes feel the need or the inclination to step forward first,” said Mr Watson.

“I do know there are people who are quite committed to doing things which would be beneficial for local communities, but they are frightened off by the criminal classes. So this is where GMP has a leadership role.”

He and his team have brought together 65 local and national agencies including Manchester city council, HM Revenue & Customs, the National Crime Agency (NCA) and City of London police, the national lead in fraud.

“Part of the problem is that the criminality has been viewed through too narrow a prism. People seem to have focused purely on counterfeit goods, which of course is a serious issue but we’ve treated it as simply bad people on the make by misusing the brands of other agencies,” he said. 

“In truth, this is a symptom of embedded, serious and organised crime. We know the spin-offs include exploitation of people trafficked into the country. That exploitation might be sexual, it might be for labour. We see cannabis growers working to pay off debts to a criminal gang that brought them into the country.

“We’ve seen young women forced into street-based sex work, we’ve literally seen shocking examples of where it is cheaper for a restaurant to send their soiled cutlery and crockery to Cheetham Hill to have some anonymised person wash it than employ a proper washer in your restaurant.”

Two 13-year-old Afghan boys who crossed the Channel last year were found by police to have been recruited by older Afghans further up the criminal gang hierarchy, according to Detective Superintendent Neil Blackwood, who heads Operation Vulcan. They were supposed to be in the care of a neighbouring authority.

Another Afghan, who also crossed the Channel to find a new life in the UK, was commuting from his hotel in Macclesfield also to act as a spotter for £20 a day. There are 40,000 migrants - largely Channel arrivals - currently housed in hotels from which they are free to come and go.

Mr Blackwood said there were intelligence gaps in the police’s understanding of how illegal migrants were being recruited and used as most were fearful of speaking for fear of violence from the traffickers to whom many still owed debts for the £10,000 price of the journey from Asia, Africa or Albania.

Progression up the ranks

For young recruits, there is progression from spotter to running the shops to becoming a supplier, who takes an unbranded t-shirt bought for 20p, sticks on the fashion labels and sells it for £10. Even a small shop unit can make £1,000 a day.

“In one raid, we seized 60 tonnes of goods, worth £7.5 million on the ‘grey’ market but £150 million retail value if legitimate,” said Mr Blackwood, who heads a team of 24 officers deployed on Operation Vulcan.

Peppered on a map of Cheetham Hill and Strangeways in Greater Manchester Police’s headquarters there are 23 dots, marking each raid over the past month: orange marks those where search warrants were executed, green where suspects were arrested and blue for closure orders as part of Operation Vulcan.

Det Supt Blackwood had just five months to put his team together to launch it before Christmas shoppers piled into the area. In a nod to tactics deployed by the FBI to bring US mobster Al Capone to justice, he said: “We will take whatever action we can against them, whether arresting them, seizing their assets, raiding their shops.

“If they have cars, do they have insurance, or a driving licence? Are they wearing a seatbelt? Whatever discourages them from coming to our area, I will do it.”

A Home Office source said: “It’s clear that in some cases there are strong links between organised criminal gangs and illegal migrants. That’s why this government is working on options to break the people traffickers’ business model and ensure we stem the flow of small boats crossing the Channel.”

Mr Blackwood also believes it is about education of the public. "It's talking about exploitative crime, the modern slavery and anti-social behaviour. We need to educate those who are travelling in to shop, and tell them: 'What you are buying is funding criminality.'"