Organized criminal gangs are targeting Europe's famers and other food producers in increasingly sophisticated ways, cheating them out of produce and driving up prices for consumers, experts have told The Guardian newspaper.

Kreseda Smith, a lecturer in rural criminology at Harper-Adams University, told the paper criminals have been looking to exploit supply-chain challenges caused by a range of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

"There's certainly been an increase in larger thefts and the number of offences," she said. "A few years ago, you'd see sheep being stolen in small numbers. Since COVID, there's been a trend toward much larger numbers of animals being taken, and there's been an increase in the types of commodities being targeted, (including) artisanal cheese, smoked salmon, and wine."

She said one of the main ways in which farmers have been victimized involves thieves posing as legitimate buyers and tricking them out of their goods without making payment.

An example of such a theft, involved a dairy delivering 22 metric tons of cheese worth around 300,000 pounds ($388,000) to someone posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer.

In another case, a smokehouse in the English county of Suffolk sent 37,000 pounds of smoked salmon to what it thought was a legitimate buyer but that was actually a car garage in East London.

And a wine merchant serving Switzerland and Germany was driven into bankruptcy after it was tricked into sending 6,500 bottles of red wine to someone posing as a buyer representing a large French supermarket who displayed an expert knowledge of the product but who was a fraudster.

Smith told The Guardian: "I have seen a lot more smaller businesses being targeted in this way; the farmers markets, farm shops, which wouldn't have been on the target list two years ago."

She said larger operators usually have checks in place that minimize the risk of them being cheated out of their produce, but smaller producers rarely have the ability to guard against all forms of theft and seem to have been identified by criminal gangs as soft touches. Additionally, because of global shortages of many products because of the supply chain issues, thieves tend to have plenty of willing buyers who are prepared to purchase items without asking too many questions about where they came from.

Jonathan Davies, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Manchester, told The Guardian criminals have become increasingly adept at conning food producers out of their stock.

"It's probably the case that the people involved either had some experience of directly working within the industry, or they've got the contacts who can advise them," he said.

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