COVIID-19: 440,000 smuggled face masks nabbed by Police

By Ambrose Nnaji

The police in France has forestalled an attempt to smuggle into the market unapproved face mask for use in the country, as many are trying to exploit the inherent fear in the world today over the novel coronavirus.

The France Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said that, by the end of April, police had pulled to bits  a number of such smuggling networks, stopped scams and attempted scams to the value of more than €30 million ($32 million), and seized 438,000 face masks in the country.

Castner

Castaner said, “If this crisis has often shown the best of ourselves and enabled exceptional acts of solidarity, it has also been an opportunity, unfortunately, for some to try to take advantage of the situation, to exploit fear and the disease.”

There has been various cases of face mask scams or attempted scam on the internet,  presently, the issue of the  5.7 million masks supposedly  ordered on the internet is  a case in point.

Doctors and opposition politicians have criticised the government for not being decisive on whether to require masks would be worn in public, and for procuring very few of them.

Since Monday, the distribution of 4.4 million masks to travellers for free started in the Ile-de-France region around Paris, as about 10 million washable masks had been given to transport operators all over France.

The Commander Karen Baxter, from the City of London Police had condemned the upsurge of internet scammers trying to pull fast one from the mask boom, he said “While the world is coming together to combat this global health crisis, criminals are intent on exploiting our unease, anxiety and vulnerabilities in these unprecedented times.

“The fact the public have taken the opportunity to fight back and show these criminals how unacceptable this is, is fantastic.”