The US$195 billion global seafood industry is “increasingly vulnerable” to fraud, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned.
This fraud ranges from selling tilapia as red snapper and farmed fish as wild, to covertly creating imitation shrimp from moulded fish paste or starch?based compounds, it notes in a new report.
The report finds that the global probability of a fisheries or aquaculture product being fraudulent is 20.6 per cent, followed by meat at 13.4 per cent, then fruits and vegetables at 10.4 per cent. Technologies such as DNA barcoding that can precisely identify species are vital to tackling the problem, the study’s authors say.
“Food fraud in fisheries is a global issue. What is worrying is the scale and persistence of the problem, and the fact that it affects every region and every market segment,” Esther Garrido Gamarro, a fisheries officer at the UN’s Food…
Insurance fraud involves making false or exaggerated claims to an insurance provider.
- Hard Fraud: Someone deliberately causes a loss (e.g., setting fire to a warehouse or staging a car accident) specifically to collect a payout.
- Soft Fraud: More common and often viewed as “victimless” by the perpetrator. It involves exaggerating a legitimate claim, such as overstating the value of stolen items in a home burglary to cover the deductible.