Dehumidified

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