The ‘Great Cheese Robbery’ and the Rise of Food Scams

A ‘big cheese heist’ which saw hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Cheddar stolen from a London cheese shop has highlighted how food retailers and restaurants are becoming increasingly vulnerable to scams.

Around £300,000 of premium British cheddar was taken from Neal’s Yard Dairy by fraudsters posing as shoppers at a French supermarket who failed to pay. The store has been “overwhelmed” by the support after news of the cheese theft broke, the London representative said. standard and the famous chef, Jamie Oliverhe asked for his 10.5 million Instagram social media followers beware because “truckloads of fancy cheese” are being sold “on the cheap”.

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The cheese story seemed all too familiar to Chris Swales of Chapel and Swan Smokehouse. This summer, he said The Timesreceived an email ordering “substantial quantities” of smoked salmon for a French supermarket. But two weeks after a UK haulage firm collected the fish, the buyer still hadn’t paid, so Swales drove to the supposed “supermarket distribution centre” where the fish had been taken and discovered it was actually a “puzzling car dealer from the east”. London”.

Another increasingly common competition involves “phishing scammers” calling a restaurant claiming to be from a booking platform and asking staff to confirm account login information, said booking platform OpenTable. The scammer would then use the reservation details stored in the account to contact diners and request credit card information, “often under the guise of placing or refunding a deposit.”

But “fraud management” is not the “core competence” of food business people, Morgan Faxley wrote for Kounta. Owners are often stuck in a “vicious cycle of risk and reward” because restaurants “generally have low profit margins.” Food companies’ desperation and the competitive industry they operate in make them ripe for the taking. As Swales put it, the fake fish business was “the kind of business we set out to do” and “we were so ready for it”. The people who defrauded him “knew the desire of a small business to grow” and “we were punished for it.”

“Damn Dealers”