Trick or Treat: Europol Seized $98.3 Million in Fake or Substandard Food and Beverages

It can lurk in grocery stores, convenience stores, bars, and restaurants. Food fraud occurs across the globe, presenting a threat to consumers’ health and safety, as well as to the reputation of legitimate brands and establishments.

In Europe, law enforcement and other government agencies have collaborated to target counterfeit and substandard products and the people and organizations behind them. The most recent effort was the 2024 rendition of Operation OPSON, now in its thirteenth year, which seized an estimated 22,000 tons of food and roughly 850,000 liters of beverages that were mostly alcoholic items. The seized goods had an estimated value of €91 million ($98.3 million).

Food fraud involves the counterfeiting of a food or beverage product. Often motivated by economic gain, this kind of fraud involves deliberately adding to, substituting, misrepresenting, or tampering with the ingredients or packaging of a food or beverage item.

This year’s Operation OPSON also resulted in the dismantling of 11 criminal network, 104 arrest warrants, 184 search warrants, 278 people reported to judicial authorities, and 5,821 checks and inspections, according to a press release from Europol. Coordinating with Europol were other law enforcement, customs, and food regulatory agencies representing 29 European nations, as well as food and beverage producers in the private sector. The European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI), and Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety also supported the operation.

“Investigators across Europe noticed a continued trend in fraudsters selling expired food,” Europol said in its press release. “Infiltrating waste disposal companies, they get their hands on masses of expired food that should be destroyed.” The fraudsters erase or remove the original expiration dates and replace them with new labels before reintroducing the products into the supply chain.

Another current trend that investigators identified was the popularity of olive oil and wines for counterfeiters. (For more food fraud trends, Security Management produced a series of articles on the topic earlier in 2024.)

Throughout Spain, the Spanish Guardia Civil, with help from Europol and the Italian Carabinieri, seized 45,000 liters of oil and roughly 120,000 cans of tuna. The four people arrested included the owners of a canning company that packaged sunflower oil into olive oil containers. Other actions in Spain included actions against counterfeiters producing oil, ham, or cheese, plus a pickle production company using illegal dyes and preservatives.  

“A mix of various factors, such as the general inflation of prices, reduced olive oil production, and increasing demand, have created the perfect breeding ground for fraudulent producers,” according to a recent joint strategic analysis report from Europol and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). “Mixing consumer-grade olive oil with lower-grade alternatives allowed the criminals to offer competitive prices while infiltrating legal supply chains.”

The report, Uncovering the ecosystem of intellectual property crime, noted that at least one investigation in 2023 uncovered a criminal network that was using lampante oil to dilute higher quality olive oils. The lower quality oil “is not intended for marketing on the retail market, but rather refined or used for industrial purposes. More than 260,000 liters of olive oil unfit for consumption were seized.”

In Italy, the Carabinieri’s Anti-Adulteration and Public Health Units collaborated with other authorities to identify and seize about 42 tons of adulterated oil that was being marketed as Italian extra virgin olive oil, some of which had already been introduced into the market. Among the seizures was 623 liters of chlorophyll—although this is a naturally occurring compound in authentic olive oil, it is often used to disguise cheaper oils that will be marketed and sold as olive oil. The addition of chlorophyll helps give other oils the look and smell of legitimate olive oil.

The Carabinieri also dismantled a criminal network that focused on producing and selling counterfeit wines. The group created fraudulent certifications to mislabel wines to sell wines that purported to have Italy’s denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) certificate, which indicates that a wine comes from a specific production area, adheres to certain methods in its production, and guarantees a quality standard.