Fishermen's gold bar prank backfires as police launch investigation

A group of fishermen were shocked to find police waiting for them at a dock in Cornwall after they posted prank photos on Facebook of a gold bar.

Skipper Billy Anderson and his crew posted the picture of what was actually an old brass bracket and boasted they had found 11 bars of bullion worth £1.5 million.

He wrote: "Who needs scallops when yer catchin these babys yeeeeee ha."

But he had to explain to police that it was just scrap metal when they swooped at the dock in Newlyn, Cornwall. They believed it could have been bullion rumoured to be on the seabed from the infamous 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery, when £26 million was stolen from a Heathrow warehouse.

According to The Sun, Mr Anderson, who works for TN Trawlers in Arran, and his crew cut up the bracket with an angle grinder in a bid to trick his fiancée into thinking they had struck gold.

And the fishermen also found themselves bombarded with requests to give the exact location of his find, 16 miles off Falmouth in Cornwall.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Mr Anderson "knew the joke had gone too far", when he saw two detectives and a PC waiting for the vessel at Newlyn when it docked after a seven-day voyage.

But, he said, "they saw the funny side". We wonder if his fiancée found it quite so amusing.

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