The 'great cheese robbery' and the rise of food scams

A "great cheese robbery", which saw Cheddar worth hundreds of thousands of pounds stolen from an artisan London cheesemonger, has highlighted how food retailers and restaurants are becoming more vulnerable to scams.

Some £300,000 of premium British Cheddar was taken from Neal's Yard Dairy by conmen pretending to be buyers from a French supermarket, and who failed to pay up. The shop has been "overwhelmed" with support after news broke of the cheese theft, said London's The Standard and the celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, has asked his 10.5 million Instagram followers on social media to be alert for "lorryloads of posh cheese" being sold "for cheap".

'Dodgy dealers'

Patrick Holden, who owns the farm where some of the stolen Cheddar was made, told the BBC that the artisan cheese sector is "a place where trust is deeply embedded in all transactions", and "a world where one's word is one's bond". But scams are a problem across the food and restaurant business.

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The cheese con story felt all too familiar to Chris Swales of Chapel and Swan Smokehouse. This summer, he told The Times, he received 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 hub" where the fish had been taken and discovered it was in fact a "dodgy car dealer in east London".

He couldn't contact the people who ordered the fish and his insurance terms don't cover the con, he said, so "it looks like I'll take the full hit". The con "won't put us out of business", but it has made life "incredibly hard" at a time when it is "already difficult".

Reputation blackmailers

Blackmailers have targeted restaurants using threats of fake reviews to extort payment. The owners of the Bracebridge restaurant chain were contacted on WhatsApp by a scammer who demanded £2,000 and threatened to flood the group's Google listings with fake one-star reviews.

Independent restaurant groups are the "perfect targets" for these sorts of "scammers", said The Sunday Times, because they are "big enough to be able to pay", but "not big enough to afford the lawyers and consultants needed to solve the problem", and "incredibly reliant" on their online reputations.

Another increasingly common con involves "phishing scammers" calling a restaurant pretending to be from a reservation-taking platform and asking staff to confirm account log-in information, said booking platform OpenTable. The scammer would then use the reservation details stored on the account to contact diners and request credit card information, "often under the guise of placing or refunding a deposit".

Holey as Swiss cheese

The "Cheddar heist" shows British supply chains are "as holey as Swiss cheese", said The Times, noting that invoice fraud rose last year by 11%, according to UK Finance, putting the total cost of fraud to the economy at £1.2 billion.

But "managing fraud" is not the "core competency" of food business people, wrote Morgan Ackley for Kount. Owners are often stuck in a "vicious cycle of risk and reward" because restaurants "generally have low profit margins". The desperation of food firms and the competitive industry they work in make them ripe for being conned. As Swales said, the hoax fish deal was "the sort of business we were aiming for" and "we were so up for it". The people who conned him "knew the desire of a small business to grow" and "we've been punished for that".