As much as we want to believe that all of the products we buy are safe, sometimes companies and certain individual manufacturers are willing to cut corners in order to turn a profit, no matter the personal cost to the customer.
You would think that this kind of thing only happens with illegal products like drugs, but unfortunately, that isn’t always the case.
Something as simple as baby formula isn’t even safe.
A frightening new scam sees people replace baby formula with flour and then return the bottles to stores for cash, allowing for other customers purchasing the tampered products and feed them to their babies, Newsweek reported.
It is normal to assume that when you feed your child something, it will be safe for them to ingest.
However, there have been multiple recent reports of babies becoming ill after ingesting the “formula”, leading to a heightened sense of fear among parents.
North Carolina mom Madeline Roque noticed something was off about her nine-month-old daughter, Adeline.
She knew something was wrong after the infant spent an entire day vomiting and passing gas.
Roque looked at the baby formula she had fed her daughter and noticed something unusual about it.
“I realized something’s definitely weird,” she said, “The color was different, the texture was different.”
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Concerned, she poured the contents of her daughter’s bottle into the sink and was shocked to see what came out.
“That’s when it hit me,” she said. “I saw how it clumped up and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, my daughter’s stomach is just the same or worse.'”
Roque returned the formula to the Wal-Mart where it had been purchased and reported it to the manager.
What appears to have happened is the formula somehow ended up available for purchase again after it had been returned for cash by someone who emptied its contents and filled it with flour.
The company has since responded, though not in the most reassuring way.
They stated that they are investigating the incident and added that stores don’t put products back on the shelf once they have been returned.
This isn’t the first time police have seen this flour-formula scam.
In June, Tampa Bay-area mom Ashley Frydrych made a Facebook post warning other mothers to check their formula before using it after unwittingly feeding flour-formula to her infant son.
She noticed he wasn’t eating properly.
That’s when her husband pointed out the formula had separated only a few minutes after making it, leading Frydrych to discover the bottle was filled with flour.
“What a selfish and pitiful way to scam stores for refund money, especially knowing another baby out there will be harmed by your actions.”
Frydrych also expressed concern over what other substances these tampered formula bottles could contain: “What if it were cleaner or something worse that could have poisoned him?”
Last year an Arizona couple were arrested after police discovered they were conducting similar flour-formula scams in their own state.
Husband and wife Rafid Khoshi, 46, and Manal Sulaiman, 43, reportedly made nearly half a million dollars reselling tampered baby formula to a distributor in El Cajon California.
In 2017 , another woman pleaded guilty to tampering with baby formula by replacing it with a flour and sugar mixture before returning it for cash.
h/t: Newsweek