Beware of the fruit scam, a spring scam

Buying fruit from door-to-door sellers is not necessarily a good idea. In the spring, scammers become more inventive in setting up scams.

The arrival of spring marks the return to the stalls of asparagus, melons and the first fruits of the season. With the rise in temperatures, the French are once again turning to markets to stroll around and perhaps do their shopping. But whether you want to eat organic and seasonal or not, you have to pay attention to what you consume. To avoid any health risk and be sure of the quality of the products you buy, it is better to check the labeling, origin and freshness of a product before buying it. These are basic reminders, but they can prove very useful because the arrival of spring also marks the return of a type of seasonal scam: the fruit scam.

As with heating scams in winter, and travel scams in summer, fruit scams often take place between April and June and consist of offering a defective product or one that will never arrive in exchange for a large sum of money. A practice which mainly affects elderly people, often alone and which combines health and financial risk.

If someone rings your doorbell, introduces themselves as a traveling salesman and offers to sell you a basket of fresh fruit, it's best to be wary because it could cost you a lot of money. The goal of these sellers is to succeed in entering a person's home and sometimes dropping off several kilos of fruit before demanding a disproportionate amount of money.

On April 4, a resident of Sarthe was trapped by two scammers in this way. Two people ring her doorbell, she opens it, imagining that they are workers working in the building where she lives. The two men present themselves as fruit sellers and are convincing, they manage to enter the octogenarian's home to drop off their baskets of "fresh" fruit. Faced with the quantity of goods gradually piling up on her balcony, the lady informs them that she has no need for all of this but the "market gardener" duo does not listen to her, claiming that she can always share the surplus with his loved ones.

The already very special situation for the retiree turns into a nightmare when the two men sit down at the table in her living room. They hand him a bill for 154 euros for 60 kilos of fruit. The victim pays and the two thugs leave. Following her mishap, she confided that the fruits “weren’t even good” and “often damaged”. One of his relatives thinks that the crooks would have helped themselves to unsold items thrown away by supermarkets. To protect yourself from this type of unpleasant surprise, it is possible to require the presentation of a professional card to direct sellers and above all, you do not need to sign anything. The most effective thing is not to open to a person who is going door to door because in this type of scam, the criminals may have prepared false information about their products.