A conman selling dangerous, non-fire retardant furniture was exposed by two newspaper reporters posing as landlords.

Jon Austin, investigations reporter with Essex daily the Echo, teamed up with trainee James Kershaw to meet the dodgy salesman in a pub car park where they covertly filmed the sale.

The trader, who lives on a traveller camp in the Echo’s patch, had earlier got two other men to advertise a sofa in its wrapping as an unwanted wedding gift in the classified section of the paper.

They placed the ad despite the Echo running a series of investigations in 2006 that linked the traveller site to the trade of dodgy furniture imported from Poland which turns into a poisonous fireball on contact with a flame.

Suspicious of the advert, Jon phoned the mobile phone number included in it and spoke to the salesman.

Jon said it soon became clear it was not a one-off sale and the trader was actually running a business selling up to 12 of the suites a day, including to estate agents.

Following the purchase, Jon drove to Yorkshire to have the furniture tested at a specialist test centre, which found the foam did not meet UK safety regulations designed to save lives.

The evidence was enough for a two-page special expose in the Echo and a five-minute web video showing the sale, fire test and a sofa being set alight.

It is the second time Jon has bought such furniture while at the Echo. It 2006 he bought a similar set from a Basildon high street shop which led to a trading standards prosecution and the firm being forced to pay £10,000.

He told HTFP: “We did a series of articles in 2006 about regular deliveries of these suites to the traveller site.

“It seems ironic that, despite this, more than two years on some of the travellers chose to advertise them in the Echo.

“Fortunately we were on to them and now people have been warned not to buy these hazards.”