Customs officers yesterday arrested the owner of a dried seafood supplier for peddling dried conch slices as abalone, an expensive delicacy.
The authorities posed as customers and bought some abalone from the “suspicious” store, the location of which has not been revealed.
Testing revealed that the abalone was in fact conch, leading the officials to seize 48 catties of the fake stuff from both the retailer and the supplier. (You could say people were duped by a conch-man…)
Seeing as how each catty was being sold for less than HKD1,000, customers should have probably known not to buy the stuff to begin with. Normally abalone is not sold in slices, and costs from a few thousand to over HKD10,000 per catty.
Any person who supplies or offers to supply any goods with a false trade description commits an offence and can be hit with a maximum fine of HKD500,000 and five years’ imprisonment.
Photo: See-ming Lee via Flickr
