Summary
One baffling online scam – involving a £138 dehumidifier – and a humiliated BBC producer who will not rest until she has a return address for it.
January 2024. Polly Weston’s toddler has a terrible cough, no one in the house is getting any sleep, and, as is traditional for Bristol Victorian Terraces, her house has a lot of damp patches. So she decides to invest in a dehumidifier.
A very convincing review online, by a real consumer journalist called Luke Edwards, recommends one company.
The company's sleek website reads “Dewett UK – Better Air, Better Life.”
Sold. She orders one for £138… Then it begins.
Luke, it turns out, had his identity stolen. Day after day he receives the same desperate phone calls from people across Britain who have fallen victim to his “byline”. The story is always the same. Once the dehumidifier arrives, it doesn’t work, and you can’t return it – Dewett will not give you a return address. It's come from China, they say, and there is no point in you sending it back. The email exchanges become increasingly wild.
But what starts out as the story of one BBC producer, on a vendetta to find a return address (and to prove, despite being duped, she’s still a good journalist)… will take us to corners of the world we never could have predicted. It might just end in us accidentally blowing the lid on something much, much bigger...
Produced and presented by Polly Weston A BBC Audio Bristol production
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:40.0 | Welcome to Seriously from BBC Radio 4. I'm Vanessa Kasule. This podcast finds the world's best |
| 0:47.0 | audio documentaries and puts them all in one place. |
| 0:51.0 | A warning. What you're about to hear is the story of a scam. The most boring |
| 0:58.0 | scam ever encountered in the history of Radio 4 documentaries about scams. |
| 1:03.0 | But please, pay attention. |
| 1:06.0 | Because what makes this scam so cunning, |
| 1:09.0 | so ruthlessly efficient, |
| 1:11.0 | is that it relies on disarming you with its very tedium. |
| 1:17.0 | Stay with me. Keep your wits about you and we'll begin. |
| 1:22.0 | A couple of months back, I was incredibly fed up. |
| 1:26.0 | The rain, which seemed like it had been falling for a hundred days, |
| 1:31.0 | was seeping through the walls of my two-year-old's bedroom. |
... |
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