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.”According to a report by the British Standards Institute, food is the commodity “most at risk of theft in global supply chains” and the degree to which it is being targeted has been rising.In 2021, 18% of supply-chain thefts in the UK were related to food and drink.In 2023, this figure had jumped to 24%, with food and drink amounting to a third of all hijacking incidents globally.

The price of food rocketed by 25% between 2022 and 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics, and during this period headline-grabbing heists abounded.In Greece, 52 tonnes of olive oil were siphoned from a warehouse in Halkidiki; in Spain, a gourmet food business was robbed of 400 legs of Iberico ham with a total price tag of €200,000.In December 2023, a trailer containing £50,000 worth of cheese was stolen from a service station on the M5 in Worcestershire.Crimes of this sort are not new – £12.5m of maple syrup was stolen from a facility in Canada in 2012 – but in recent years numerous factors have combined to make high-value food far more appealing to criminals.

The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis all drove up food prices, as has the impact of climate change – drought in Spain caused the price of olive oil to jump by 70% in 2023,A decade ago, Russia banned the import of EU food, creating a lucrative hidden market,Many suspect that the cheddar from the Neal’s Yard heist has gone east, where demand for European delicacies remains high,Custom officers in Russia are known to have busted shipments of Dorblu Classic, Formaggio Retinato Leone, Chèvrano XO and Grana Padano, all being smuggled across the border (it’s impossible, it seems, to sanction one’s desire for a cheese plate),Here in the UK, Brexit created an additional vulnerability for what is sometimes described as “European distribution fraud”.

As Alice Rizzuti, a criminologist at the University of Hull with a specialism in food crime, told me: “People might have thought being out of the common market would have meant more controls and checks on the border.But, actually, it was the opposite.And because we’re not part of the EU any more, the cooperation with EU counterparts is not as much as it used to be.”Rizzuti tells me that attention to food crime has risen in the past decade, driven primarily by high-profile crimes.It started in 2013, when the UK was roiled by the horse-meat scandal that led two years later to the formation of the National Food Crime Unit, a law enforcement branch of the Food Standards Agency.

The tendency to see food crime as less serious, she explains, is one reason that it has been able to proliferate – it’s a lower stakes racket than, say, drug smuggling – and often the crimes are committed by those within the industry who may be otherwise running a legitimate business.“But it is serious,” she says.“Because of the safety, security and reliability of the food market.And whether it is fraud or theft, there are often links to other crime types – organised criminals might be using the profits to commit other crimes.”For John Farrand, managing director of the Guild of Fine Food, it’s the level of sophistication that has changed.

Parmigiano Reggiano, he points out, has always been a commodity targeted by thieves, and in 1998 Jamie Montgomery had £30,000 worth of award-winning cheddar stolen from his warehouse in Somerset.That great cheese robbery (as headlines at the time also cleverly referred to it) was a relatively straightforward smash-and-grab.“But last year,” says Farrand, “it seems like these thieves stepped up the level by which they operated.What they understood about the food that they were stealing and the way they communicated with these small food and drink producers was – dare I say – quite clever.They spoke in the language of a buyer, they provided fake paperwork… I think [this crime] has always been here but it’s got smarter – probably because there’s more money in it for the robbers.

”When word got out that Swales had fallen victim to a fraud, his phone started ringing,He began to hear from many other small food producers, some with far worse experiences than his own,There was another smoked salmon producer, he told me, who was bankrupted after losing £80,000 in a similar fashion and had to remortgage his house,Swales was also contacted by a haulage company that had been left with unpaid invoices after delivering huge quantities of alcohol from Ukraine to France over the summer,In that particular case, the name of the customer was familiar: Patrick Moulin.

Another producer who got in touch was John Gill from Coston Hall Dairy, in Norfolk.While he hadn’t been defrauded out of any produce himself – in fact, the farm really only sold small quantities of raw milk from an on-site vending machine – he had fallen victim to an identity theft in which criminals co-opted Coston Hall’s details in order to place dozens of orders for cheese, fruit and meat with different producers around the country.One of the biggest orders, he says, was for a container of salmon for £150,000.Gill only became aware of this, he tells me, when he began receiving phone calls from suppliers who wanted to confirm an order.He came out of a meeting in late November 2024 to find a dozen missed calls.

Every day for the next two weeks he’d get several more, each time he’d have to explain and the supplier would cancel the order.He still has no idea how many people got fooled; the scammers, he later discovered, had changed the contact details on Coston Hall’s searchable Google profile, so that if someone used that number to verify an order, they would have been directed right back to the criminals (only those who used the number on their website got through to John).All he could do was try to get the word out through their network – posting on social media and putting a banner on their website.But it was a nerve-racking experience.“It really got in your head,” Gill said.

One worry was that they might start hearing from producers expecting them to pay up.His sleep was affected, his ability to trust.“I mean, I don’t even know if you’re who you say you are,” he tells me when we speak over the phone.Again, it was a sophisticated operation.The fraudsters took Coston Hall’s details from Companies House, and used a photograph of Gill’s wife in communications, to appear more trustworthy.

One producer Gill spoke to was contacted by the scammers several weeks earlier – priming him for a future order – and others were told to prepare for up to £1m worth of future trade,The fraudsters requested 30-day payment terms, or they’d try to pay by credit card and if the supplier did a credit check it would come up fine, since they were using Coston Hall’s details,Gill is certain that during this period the fraudsters themselves phoned the farm, in order to suss out how to evade detection for longer, which he still finds chilling,Just like Swales, Gill believes he was dealing with specialists,According to producers he spoke to, the people on the other end of the line “sounded very genuine.

They knew what they were talking about.They knew the industry.” There was a group of around four or five people, he believes, all with Essex accents.The food was all being directed to Southend.Gill suspects the food might be destined for Christmas markets.

For smaller quantities, perhaps.But Swales and the cheesemakers affected by the Neal’s Yard theft believe that it would be very difficult to shift this kind of food in the UK once restaurants and retailers were on alert.As Swales points out, it’s a small community.“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, so I know most,” he says.“I started sending out warning emails to say if you get offered some frozen smoked salmon without a brand label for the French market, let me know straight away.

“I expected someone to go, ‘Yeah I saw some of this at the market last week,’” The fact that they didn’t was another strong indicator that the salmon had left the country,Swales believes that the police could be doing far more to hunt down the perpetrators,He reported the offence to Action Fraud and several weeks later received a response informing him that “It has not been possible to identify a line of enquiry which a law enforcement organisation in the United Kingdom could pursue,” To Swales, this was staggering.

There was, he says, a CCTV camera outside the entrance to the industrial estate.All the police would need to do is spot the delivery truck, track the licence plate and they’d be on the tail of his stolen fish.“I was just so angry and upset,” he said.“Inertia and inaction is something I just can’t handle.”When I put this to Action Fraud I was told that “Over 850,000 reports are made to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau every year and not all cases can be passed on for further investigation