Have you ever wondered why so many food products have tamper seals on them?
Until the 1980s, these seals were not a commonplace sight, but a number of high profile product
tampering cases forced companies to make their packaging tamperproof in order to restore
customer trust. In this video, I am going to look at some of the most disturbing cases
of product tampering ever recorded.
Ill start with a case known as "The Vending Machine Killings".
In 1985, in Japan, 12 people were killed and at least 35 hospitalized
after drinking poisoned soft drinks.
An unidentified assailant was leaving bottles inside the dispensing hatch of vending machines.
When somebody bought something from the machine,
they would find and extra bottle inside the hatch.
Assuming they had got lucky and the machine had dispensed an extra item by mistake, they
would happily take the extra items and drink it.
Unbeknownst to them, the extra drink had been laced with Paraquat, a deadly herbicide.
Paraquat can cause a very slow and painful death.
A dose of around 2 teaspoons is enough to be lethal.
Within a few hours of consuming it, people begin to feel very sick.
the internal organs begin to shut down.
First the liver and kidneys fail, finally the heart and lungs.
It can take up to 30 agonizing days for someone to die of Paraquat poisoning.
The vending machine killer was able to get away with their crimes because Paraquat was
a common method of suicide at the time.
After the police finally figured out what was happening, vending machines
were labelled with warning signs and the killings seemed to stop.
This wasnt the first time Japanese vending machine drinks poisoned.
In 1977, at least 4 people died after drinking Coca Cola that had been laced with cyanide.
In Tokyo some years after the paraquat poisoning, vending machine drinks were found to have
been laced with lime sulphur.
The motives behind these poisonings remain unclear.
Most product tampering cases seem to be done for revenge or blackmail, but the vending
machine killer appears to have done it just for the thrill.
In all of these vending machine poison cases, nobody was ever caught,
and they still remain at large today.
There was another high profile product tampering case in Japan.
In 1984, a terrorist group known as "The Monster with 21 Faces" placed boxes of candy filled
with cyanide on store shelves.
21 packets of poisoned candy were found.
They had all been labelled with a warning sticker which read "Danger: Contains Toxins"
In this case, the aim was not to kill indiscriminately, but to cause panic among consumers
and to extort money from the companies which produced the candy.
As with the vending machine poisoners, nobody involved was ever caught, and the case remains
unsolved to this day.
This case comes from England.
Rodney Whitchelo was a former Scotland Yard detective
who thought he could get away with the perfect crime.
In the 1980s he began a blackmail campaign against the Pedigree Dog Food company.
He injected cans of dog food with poison and placed them on shelves in stores around England.
He sent one of the contaminated tins to the company director, demanding £500,000 or he
would continue to poison their products.
When his demands were not met, he decided he needed a more serious target, and started
to contaminate jars of baby food.
In 1989, he attempted to blackmail the Heinz company for 1 million pounds.
He mixed broken glass, razor blades and caustic soda into jars of baby food
and placed them on supermarket shelves.
This causes a major panic nationwide as worried parents rushed their children to hospital,
suspecting them of having eaten contaminated baby food.
Luckily, a lot of these cases turned out to be parents being overcautious,
or people falsely trying to compensation money, but a number of these cases actually were genuine.
One boy was was hospitalized after swallowing chunks of broken glass from a jar
of strawberry yoghurt.
Only two jars of contaminated baby food were actually recovered from supermarket shelves , but it
was enough for Heinz to recall over 30 million pounds of stock.
Rodney Whitchelo used his police training to get away with his crimes, but was eventually
caught as he attempted to withdraw money from a cash machine.
He was sentenced to 17 years in jail, but he is now back on the streets.
Luckily these day, jars of baby food are tamper proof.
I remember hearing about this case back in the early 90s and it was also said that he
put caustic soda into bottles of washing up liquid so that people would suffer horrible
burns when they tried wash the dishes. I cant find any reference to this today.
So maybe it was just something made up by the tabloids at the time
Im not too sure.
In 2003, an alarming number of poisonings occured across Italy.
Victims were rushed to hospital suffering from severe internal burns to the stomach
and esophagus.
They had all drank the same product, a bottle of water.
At least 20 cases were reported in different places across the country.
Police found that someone has injected bleach, acetone or ammonia into the bottles through
the top of cap.
The pinprick hole was too small to be noticed by most people, and the toxic substance was
invisible once it was mixed with the water.
The sheer amount of poisonings, and the large distances between each one led police to
believe this was the work of an organised gang.
So far, nobody has been caught and the motive for these crimes has not been discovered.
In 1984, a consumer panic swept the United States when boxes of Girl Scout Cookies were
found to have been contaminated with needles and other sharp metal objects.
Reports came in from 15 different states across the country.
People would buy seemingly unopened boxes of cookies, only to find a nasty surprise when
they bit into them.
A 9 year old boy was rushed to hospital after a needle went into his gum after eating
One of the cookies
One mother broke a cookie in half to share with her son and found 2 pieces of thin metal inside
A police investigation found that metal objects had been inserted into the cookies after the
boxes had been sealed.
The needles were thin enough to be pushed through the outside of packaging
and into the cookies without being detected.
As with a lot of these product tampering cases, the perpetrators have never been found.
Perhaps the most famous case is that of the Tylenol Poisonings of
1982.
In the Chicago area, a number of people died after consuming
a capsule of the painkiller Tylenol.
Later anaylsis found the pills has been laced with cyanide.
Johnson and Johnson recalled millions of dollars worth of tylenol and police issued warnings
for people not to take the drug, but the damage had already been done.
7 people died from the taking contaminated Tylenol, including a 12 year old girl and
three members of the same family.
Ths also gave rise to a number of similar crimes across America.
All across the country, people were being rushed to hospital after consuming tainted painkillers.
Rat poison and bleach were among the contaminants used by copycat criminals.
Once again, nobody was ever caught, and the reason why over the counter medicine is so
heavily sealed today is directly because of these incidents.
There are also a number of dubious cases of product tampering.
Those stories that may have an element of truth, but most likely
they fall into the the category of urban legend.
The first is the legend of the LSD laced temporary tattoos.
The story has been going around since at least the 70s.
Apparently crazed hippies are going round putting doses of LSD into temporary tattoos.
The drug is then absorbed either when the victim licks the tattoo to wet it,
or when they place it onto their skin.
There have been a number of fliers circulated over the years warning parents on which tattoos
to look out for.
Usually it is a Mickey Mouse or Bart Simpson tattoo.
Quite why hippies would waste expensive LSD on spiking a few kids is beyond me, but the
rumour persists to this day.
According to Snopes the stories are untrue, but I did find a news article from 2016 claiming
police had recovered a bag full of LSD laced temporary tattoos
from an elementary school in Indiana.
Apparently one pupil found the bag and decided to apply one of the tattoos, but soon began
to feel funny and was rushed to hospital.
This time the tattoos were of Dora the Explorer and Spongebob Squarepants rather than Mickey
and Bart, but otherwise the article is very similar to the urban legends.
Another dubious story is the numerous incidents of people claiming to have found used needles
inside cans of Pepsi.
these stories reached their peak in 1993 after various news outlets ran stories about people
finding syringes in their drinks.
It seems that most of these reports were made falsely by people hoping to sue the company
for millions in compensation.
At least 52 reports were made in one year, but I dont think a single one has actually
been confirmed.
There was a case in 1990 in Ontario when a shop owner found a syringe poking out of
his can of Pepsi. It was suspected to be the work of a disgruntled employee.
But this was just one incident
an organised campaign of inserting needles into Pepsi products seems unlikely.
Perhaps the most well known product tampering urban legend comes up every single year.
The tale of razor blades in Halloween candy.
Now, there have been a small number of isolated cases of people finding sharp metal objects
in Halloween candy.
Most of these have turned out to be hoaxes.
In the year 2000, Minneapolis man James Joseph Smith handed out Snickers bars
which he had stuck needles into.
Only one boy was injured, and James Jospeh Smith was swiftly caught and jailed.
Given the rarity of these incidents, the chances of finding a razor blade
in your trick or treat bag is probably very low.
Even so, parents still warn their children to check the candy very carefully before eating it
So there's some sinister cases of product tampering.
Whilst some may just be urban legends, other cases are definitely true.
Modern packaging may have a lot more safeguards today,
but it is never completely foolproof.
The scary thing about these cases is how easy it seems to be to get away with it.
Only a small handful of people have ever been charged with product tampering, the vast majority
seem to have got away with it completely.
So be careful next time you buy something, especially if you get a free item from
a vending machine, or if your box of cookies seems to have a weird hole in the side.
How often do you really check the tamper seals on a product before you tuck in?
So thankyou for watching this video.
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Yum yum.
Until next time, goodbye.