From The Observer (Guardian), April 13:
Who would steal 22 tonnes of posh cheese, or £37,000 of smoked salmon? A rise in fraudulent orders for luxury foodstuffs has rattled the industry, leaving artisan producers with unpaid bills and a truckload of questions…
One day in October 2024, Chris Swales, 54, a smoked-salmon producer with a confident demeanour and a stubbled jaw, stood at the gates of an industrial estate in east London staking out the units. There were teenagers loitering about, knackered cars, XL Bullies; everyone seemed to have more than one phone. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where nine pallets of frozen fish would be delivered, but – he checked the address he had noted down from the courier – this was the place.
A couple of months earlier, Swales couldn’t have imagined that he’d be sniffing around Walthamstow on the hunt for £37,000 in missing produce, yet here he was. In August, he’d received an email – subject: “Collaboration” – from a man named Patrick Moulin, who claimed to be the buyer for Match, a French supermarket. Moulin was looking for an ongoing supplier of smoked salmon and hoped that Swales’s company, the Chapel & Swan Smokehouse in Exning, Suffolk, would provide it.
The orders were big. Not crazy big, but big enough to make Swales reconfigure the production schedule of his 10-person team to meet it. Over the following weeks they worked “hammer and tongs”, loading up the produce in batches to be frozen and stored at a depot in Grimsby until the total order was completed. Soon enough, Swales was notified that it had been collected and the appropriate paperwork signed.
Two weeks later, Swales was still waiting to receive payment. He chased, but when Moulin requested he take payment on receipt of the second batch of smoked salmon – worth another £55,000 – Swales put his foot down: “I was never going to say yes to that.” The line went cold.
Calls to Moulin now went unanswered. So Swales phoned Match directly and asked to be put through to their buyer. No, a woman on the other end of the line told him, no one by the name of Moulin here. Swales felt a sense of panic rising. He was determined to find out where the goods went, so the next morning he hopped in his car and sped to London. “I knew something was wrong,” he said. “But still I was thinking to myself, this is very, very odd. I mean, I’ve never heard of anyone stealing frozen smoked salmon before. Why would you want it?” Deep down, he still believed that everything would work out.
Now, surveying the units in the yard, he was less sure. None of the units seemed refrigerated, but he spotted a shipping container at the back with a condenser attached, which he reckoned could have done the job. He strode in and a man with a dog approached. “You don’t know anything about a frozen distribution point for a French supermarket?” Swales asked. He was met with an icy stare. “Sorry,” Swales mumbled, “I think I’ve got the wrong address.” He hurried out of the yard and got back in his car, heart racing. The cold reality of what had happened finally sunk in. “I was so furious that I’d been duped,” he says. “Then all these other stories started coming out…”
In late October 2024, news broke that Neal’s Yard Dairy, one of the UK’s best-known purveyors of artisan cheese, had fallen victim to a scam of grand proportions. A fraudulent buyer, who posed – much like Moulin – as a representative for a major French retailer, placed an order for 22 tonnes of award-winning cheddar. A total of 950 clothbound wheels of Hafod, Westcombe and Pitchfork worth £300,000 were delivered to a warehouse in London. By the time Neal’s Yard realised that the buyer was not who they said they were, it was too late.
The Great Cheese Robbery struck a chord, making headlines around the world. “That’s a Lot of Cheddar” read one in the New York Times. Jamie Oliver put out a warning to his 10.5m Instagram followers. “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong ’uns,” he said in a video posted to the app. “Are they going to unpeel it from the cloth and cut it and grate it and get rid of it in the fast food industry, in the commercial industry? I don’t know – it feels like a really weird thing to nick.”
Something about a crime of this nature captured the imagination. It was both shocking – a friendly independent business, defrauded – and comic, evoking the plot of a Wallace and Gromit film. Food theft is often thought of as unserious, but the scale of this offence challenged that assumption. Just as rates of shoplifting were reaching a 20-year high, organised criminals were homing in on big busts of luxury fare, reaffirming the value of a commodity too often taken for granted. These were people with a knowledge of the industry, an eye for high-value produce and the means to shimmy it undetected through blackmarket channels. The correspondence Swales had with Moulin contained a detailed negotiation over quantities and logistics; Neal’s Yard described the fraud as “deceptively convincing”, adding that “Conversations with the alleged representative demonstrated a deep understanding of the sector.”....
....MUCH MORE
Also at The Guardian (probably unrelated):
