The fresh produce industry has been defrauded out of an estimated £2 million over the past month as a result of the email scam first reported by freshinfo in March.
The most galling aspect of this worrying new trend is that the fraudsters appear to have accomplices within UK wholesale firms.
The number of UK companies who have had their identities used fraudulently has increased six-fold and now includes at least one large category manager for a major multiple.
Large consignments of produce including tomatoes, onions and potatoes from Spain and France have been ordered fraudulently and are being sold on via UK wholesale markets. The fraudsters are exploiting any weakness they can find in companies’ email, internet and fax security systems to clone their identities, run parallel email accounts and place orders which are intercepted by them on arrival in the UK.
Several suppliers on the continent have lost large sums of money and have reportedly been dismissing staff as a result. Police forces in the UK, Spain and France are now working to catch those responsible.
Peter Davis of Davis Worldwide, who first exposed the scam, has become increasingly frustrated at the lack of unity in the trade to tackle this serious issue. “Several companies have been caught up in this like us in the UK, but only two have come forward. If we don’t work together to try and stop this then the UK will not get credit insurance abroad and people will stop supplying this market. It is not good for the trade. We have to get together on this.”
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