Travel firms' staff paid to tip-off Customs on suspicious customers

Britain's travel agents are being paid to operate as undercover drug informants. High-street sales staff, along with booking agents for airlines and ferries, are given substantial cash rewards by HM Customs in return for tip-offs about suspected drug-runners and money-launderers.

Customs & Excise officers are also providing training and advice for would-be informers about how to spot a criminal, and a hotline to report them. Successful "snouts" can earn from pounds 50 to as much as pounds 10,000 in exceptional cases.

It is understood that one of the four largest travel agents gets about 20 reports of suspicious customers every day, although the majority of these are false alarms. The use of informants is being encouraged in all parts of the travel industry.

British Airways is offering to pay its staff extra bonuses, in addition to any Customs rewards, for positive reports. Assistance from BA staff at London airports helped Customs officers make 56 drug seizures, worth about pounds 7m, in the first six months of last year.

Travel agents are encouraged to look out for holidaymakers acting suspiciously. Among the tell-tale signs are customers who pay for holidays or flights with large sums of cash, have new passports (they may be forged), are not interested in getting a cheap deal, take trips to well-known drug centres such as the Netherlands, Jamaica, and Thailand, and who pay at the last minute.

A Customs spokesman said: "We are after things that will arouse people's suspicion, which might be connected with drug-smuggling.

"Occasionally the information leads to seizures and arrests but more often it adds another piece to the jigsaw."

He added: "If someone gave us the names, dates and delivery, of a major drugs operation they could get from pounds 20,000 to pounds 30,000 reward, but this is not the kind of detailed information travel agents come across."

The drugs hotline - 0800 595000 - receives about 2,500 calls a month, although the proportion of these that are made by travel agents is unknown.

Travel companies were quick yesterday to play down the idea that their staff had become paid spies.

Thomas Cook, the fourth-largest travel agent, trains all new employees about how to identify suspected criminals. A spokeswoman said: "They have a prompt-card with key points to look out for."

Details of suspicious customers are passed on to the head office, as the company discourages employees collecting reward money.

Lunn Poly, Britain's largest travel agent, confirmed it has "security procedures" which were used by staff to identify potential offenders, but refused to discuss any of the details. A spokeswoman denied that staff received cash rewards: "There's no sanction from head office [for Customs] to recruit staff."

Informers are increasingly being used to help tackle the growing drug problem. There were record seizures last year, which rose by 6 per cent to 115,000, the highest yet.