With COVID-19 rampaging through the world in 2020, global businesses were disrupted. The resulting pandemic caused many undesirable economic and societal effects including: sudden supply shortages, economic recession, unemployment, lower consumer incomes, reduced business revenues and increased business losses. A knock-on effect of these effects is increased opportunity for illicit trade to take place and food fraud. Paradoxically the coronavirus outbreak threatened legal global distribution routes and facilitated some fraudulent trade, highlighting that fraud is opportunistic by nature. This is not unexpected as case history and published literature highlights increased fraud in the aftermath of hurricanes and other natural disasters. History teaches us that fraudulent activities in the aftermath or amid a crisis result from “at-risk” individuals e.g., those in poverty, criminals or opportunists, taking advantage from weaknesses in systems e.g., food chain, financial services etc. and as crime increases offenders are motivated to find new flaws to exploit. So far, there are no international data available to compare incidence of food fraud and adulteration during pandemic to any previous pre-pandemic period. The scope of this paper is not therefore to assert that there was a pandemic related increase in food fraud, but to indicate market and supply chain weaknesses and disturbances that may have exposed the market to a higher risk of food fraud vulnerability during the pandemic. Indication of these system weaknesses, highlights areas that might deserve special monitoring and development to reduce vulnerability in any future global crisis.

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