Solano County Warns Of Fake Health Inspectors

It’s a bit of a mystery: What would a fake health inspector want with local businesses?

The county Environmental Health Services Division sent out an alert Friday about a person or people contacting local food facilities and posing as health inspectors. So far there have been two known fraudulent contacts, one with a facility in Vallejo and the other with a facility in Fairfield, according to Terry Schmidtbauer, Environmental Health Manager.

“We don’t have a lot of information about it,” he said. “We just know that the person or people called and tried to schedule an inspection after 3:30p.m.”

No one ever arrived at the scheduled time to perform an inspection, which leads Schmidtbauer to shrug his shoulders at the purpose of the fake health inspectors. He speculates the calls may be to extract personal information from business owners.

Luckily, the two facilities that were contacted have established relationships with their inspectors, knew the calls were fraudulent and called the county.

Any business that has a question about a call from an inspector can call the Environmental Health Services Division at 707-784-6765, and also know that real inspectors carry proper identification on them.

“Inspections are always performed by environmental health specialists carrying official Solano County identification badges with their photograph and are generally performed unannounced,” Schmidtbauer said in a press release.

Schmidtbauer said this is the first time he’s heard of a fake inspector scam attempted in Solano County, but that it has happened in other counties in the region.