Thieves and fraudsters have a bad start to the year

Fraudsters have had a bad January with the discovery in China of 40,000 bottles of fake Lafite and Penfold in a police raid. Valued at US$1.5 million, it is the largest fraud bust in the Chinese province of Fujian.

Just before Christmas, Hong Kong customs seized 9,000 bottles of smuggled wine, this time the fraudsters were shipping genuine Penfolds wine to Shanghai trying to avoid China's punitive tax on Australian wines.

It isn’t just in China where wine fraud occurs, five people have been convicted for their part in a huge wine fraud that saw nearly 3.5 million litres of Spanish wine being exported to France and sold as French wine.

Meanwhile, top Bordeaux and Californian wines were among several hundred bottles recently stolen from Kracher Fine Wine in Austria.

England had it’s own little Britain fraud, where a delivery driver misdelivered £12,000 of wine destined for Selfridges in Birmingham. In this fraud he supplied the wines to his accomplices, before faking delivery notes.