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 UK 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.
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