Teen conman flees Britain after £100,000 fake driving licence scam

After we found him in Singapore, Ye-Ming Yuen, who went to £25,000-a-year Westminster School, admitted to us that he manufactured fake documents and sold them to pupils from other top fee-paying schools.

The forgeries enabled the teenagers to buy alcohol at pubs and off-licences by concealing their true age.

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Detectives believe at least 4,000 licences - which are laminated and show up as fakes only when an ultraviolet light reveals the absence of a watermark - were produced over two years and sold for between £15 and £25 each.

So far, 40 have been recovered by police in Wimbledon alone after pupils were found in possession of them.

When police went to Yuen's family home in Putney, South-West London, they were told he had left for the Far East.

We found 18-year-old Yuen at Home Club, a Singapore nightclub where he has worked as a resident DJ under the name DJ Ming since April.

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Admitting he was the ringleader of the scam, he said he had done it to fund his party lifestyle.

He said: "I'm sorry for what I did. I regret it now. But it was such an easy way to make money and my friends and I were so desperate to get into the clubs.

"I was a slave to the club culture and so were all my mates but we did not have the money and were too young.

"The first driving licence I did for myself when I was 16, making myself two years older.

"Then I did one for a friend at Westminster. Soon there was a big market for them at £25 a time. Everybody wanted them."

The London-born teenager said he was now living with an uncle and doing a graduate course in advertising design.

Police in London heard about the market in fake driving licences after pubs and off-licences began confiscating the high-quality forgeries and handing them in last year.

When police questioned underage drinkers about where they had got them, one name kept cropping up.

Sergeant Adrian Sutherland said: "These were very good copies of driving licences done on a home computer.

"It seems the individual concerned had downloaded a template from the internet and added a photo and false details, including a false date of birth to make them over 18.

"Through questioning some of the teenagers we found with the fake licences we got a name but when we went to the address in May we found he had already gone to Singapore."

He added: "Most customers are from public schools in the Greater London area, although it is a problem that spans the whole of the south of England."

The teenagers found with the fakes have mostly been dealt with by reprimands.

Yuen, who transferred to Graveney School in Tooting, South-West London, after his GCSEs, lived with his family in a modest terrace house in Putney.

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He added: "Soon everybody wanted them. I was making about £1,000 a week but I was just being silly with the money.

"I spent lots of it on computer stuff and the rest on taking my friends out.

"They all knew I was rich so I was expected to pay most of the bills.

"I had to leave Westminster because my father (a Chinese national) lost a lot of money on some bad investments.

"When I finally left the country, after paying my air fare I only had £300 in my pocket."

A former Westminster classmate said: "I know he was making a lot of money out of it. The sale of ID cards goes on in every school I know of."

Under the 2006 Fraud Act, supplying an article for use in fraud carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that officers are investigating the alleged production and supply of forged documentation."