Food fraud is as old as mankind but has advanced in the last decades. Fraud regarding the gross composition of food has progressed in the direction of the addition of unconventional adulterants. Furthermore, consumers are more and more interested in how and where their foods are produced and pay price premiums for organic foods, fair trade, animal welfare considering, and sustainable food products. Since these products are very similar to their conventional counterparts in terms of composition, they provide an additional challenge. The knowledge regarding occurrence, type of meat fraud, causes and damage caused to the sector is limited. There is a need for extensive identification of the vulnerabilities and criminogenic factors. These insights offer leads for detection and prevention. The article deals with a first step into the inventory of these vulnerabilities and factors affecting meat fraud, by assessing fraud risks related to products, companies and the meat supply chain.

In this article four possible relations of the credit crunch and corporate crime are examined. A first relation is that cases of accounting fraud have contributed to the causation of the crisis. Due to these scandals the trust in large corporations and the financial sector would have been eroded. A second possible relation is the reverse: the crisis will lead to more corporate crime. Because of the crisis companies run into financial difficulties. In their despair they could try to cut costs by not complying with regulations or they could try to gain illegal profits through fraud. The third relation is the criminalization of more unethical corporate behavior. The moral outrage on the behavior of banks and insurance companies that contributed to the crisis might lead to an increased labeling of risky or greedy of corporate executives as crime. This will result in more regulation. The fourth and final relation is that these amplification effects will lead to the discovery of more corporate crime.