J
ake the black labrador is sniffing
his way around a doorframe
excitedly, his tail drumming a
radiator. Something has caught
his attention. For a moment he
stops and rests his nose on the
frame. “It’s here,” he’s saying.
“Found it.” Stuffed behind the
woodwork, sticking out by a
millimetre, is a microSD card,
a tiny digital storage device that someone
— usually a crook, but in this case an
instructor at the Metropolitan Police’s
dog training centre in Keston, southeast
London — has attempted to hide.
“Good boy, Jake!” says PC Chris Duffee,
Jake’s handler, clicking a training clicker —
an instant Pavlovian signal that lets Jake
know he has done his job — and dropping a
tennis ball as a reward. Three-year-old Jake
will do anything for a tennis ball, and as one
of the Met’s four digital media detection
dogs — a small but growing pack of hounds
trained to unearth the tech used in crime
— he knows exactly what he needs to do to
be given one. Next, he sniffs out a USB stick
that has been wedged under a table. Click
goes the clicker; down goes the ball again.
Whenever Jake makes a “find”, he gets his
reward. It’s all a game to him. But to the
police it’s a deadly serious business.
With cybercrime soaring, criminals
becoming more tech literate, and the size
of their devices and memory cards shrinking,
making them easier to hide, police forces
have turned to the olfactory superpowers
of dogs to hunt for evidence. Whether it’s
a Sim card from a drug gang’s burner phone,
a key fob for a getaway car, a terrorist’s
mobile phone, a laptop in a fraud case or a
paedophile’s hidden USB stick, Jake and his
fellow “digi-dogs” can sniff it out.
“On every digital storage device there is
a chemical that has a very specific scent,”
explains the instructor, PC Brett French,
one of three dog handlers who have been
spearheading the Met’s digi-dog training
scheme in conjunction with scientists
from King’s College London since 2018.
“These dogs can detect as little as 0.
of a gram of it.” Dogs’ noses, French tells
me, are packed with about 300 million
olfactory receptors, compared with a paltry
six million in ours.
A year ago, shortly after completing a
ten-week training course at Keston, Duffee
and Jake joined French and his digi-dog,
a cocker spaniel called Rhubarb, on their
first raid and got an instant “result”. Their
search of a property in Perivale, west
London, led to the conviction of a known
high-risk sex offender. Police had suspected
that Nicky Mitchell, 38, might be
concealing more digital devices than his
sexual harm prevention order allowed.
The order — issued to him after he was
found to have indecent images of children
while working as an au pair in America —
contained several prohibitions, one of
which was that he must declare any
internet-enabled devices to his offender
manager. Jake and Rhubarb sniffed out nine
prohibited devices at his home, including a
mobile phone, a camcorder, a hard drive
and three USB sticks. Mitchell pleaded
guilty to repeatedly breaching his order at
Isleworth crown court last December.
He is due to be sentenced this week.
“We’ve had a lot of successes,” Duffee
says, patting Jake. “The best ones for us
are those that are deliberately concealed.”
On another raid he says, “Jake gave me an
indication on an empty iPhone box. He
was adamant there was something there.
Initially I thought maybe he’s just picking
up a residual trace of the phone. But it
revealed a false bottom, and within that
was a hidden phone. They’re making these
finds all the time — it’s stuff that could
easily be missed by officers in a search.”
One of the Met’s first digi-dogs, Bolly,
a female springer spaniel, unearthed a car
key hidden in a pile of boxes that turned
out to be vital evidence in a brutal 2019
jewellery robbery. A gang of four men were
subsequently found guilty of beating up
and robbing a travelling salesman of
£4.1 million of Le Vian jewellery in the
car park of a shopping centre in Staines,
Surrey. They were sentenced to 65 years
combined jail time.
Digi-dogs have also been involved in an
international swoop on suspected bitcoin
thieves. “Our dogs can find crypto wallets,”
Duffee says, referring to the thumb drives
on which people keep their private keys
to access and move cryptocurrencies. In
June 2019 six people were arrested in co-
ordinated raids in Bath, and in Amsterdam
and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as part
of a cyberfraud investigation into the theft
of more than £22 million worth of bitcoin
from an estimated 4,000-plus victims
worldwide. Digi-dogs from the Met and
from Devon and Cornwall police were
called in for the search.
“We’ve been working with all sorts of
multi-agency partners and having some
really good results,” Duffee says — some
Above left: PC Chris Duffee indicates an area
for Jake to search. Left: he finds a USB stick.
Above: Jake and Max are trained with a ball
MAX THE
BOMB DETECTOR
JAKE THE
DIGI DOG
10 • The Sunday Times Magazine
