Tampering (crime)

Tampering can refer to many forms of

. Since the person making the modification is typically long gone by the time the crime is discovered, many of these cases are never solved.

The crime is often linked with attempts to extort money from the manufacturer, and in many cases no contamination to a product ever takes place. Fraud is sometimes handled as a matter of civil law, but actual modification of products is almost always a matter of criminal law.

Examples

1982 Chicago Tylenol murders

Seven people died in this

seals on over-the-counter medications and changes in US tampering laws.

Foreign objects

Tampering cases often involve foreign objects in food products.^[1][2] These cases often focus on determining whether the contamination occurred during manufacturing, either accidentally or intentionally, or whether the claims made by the complaining customers are real or fraudulent.

Fraudulent claims

A famous case involving claims by customers that had tainted the products themselves was a series of claims in 1993 of needles found in Pepsi products. The manufacturer convincingly demonstrated that the contamination could not have taken place at the bottling plant, and several people were proven to have put the needles in themselves.^[3]

Hardware Trojan

Hardware Trojan (HT), malicious modification of the circuitry of an integrated circuit.

2018 Australian strawberry contamination

A strawberry tampering crisis where sewing needles were found in a large number of consumer strawberry brands in several Australian states, leading to supermarkets halting strawberry sales for weeks, and forcing farms to dump and burn hundreds of tonnes of produce.

References

External links

• Federal Anti-Tampering Act (US)
• Five major product tampering cases CBC News, 2 August 2012