Zomato has made food deliveries convenient and quick for millions of Indians, but it seems that some of its restaurants were delivering more than just food.
Zomato has admitted that “prohibited items” were being sold on its platform under fake names. Zomato’s comments come after users had pointed out who several restaurants in Chandigarh which seemed to offer strange dishes like “Naughty Strawberry” at high prices of Rs. 999. Zomato seems to have investigated into the issue and discovered that its services were likely being used to peddle prohibited items in the city.
“We have noticed social media conversations around single-dish restaurants listed on Zomato,” Zomato said on X. “We have identified all such restaurants that were potentially fraudulent and have delisted them from our platform. To solve this more comprehensively, we have also investigated all other restaurants which have a very limited menu on Zomato and might have listed prohibited items or worked around a way to list prohibited items,” it added.
“As per our policy, all restaurants listed on Zomato need to have a FSSAI license and we also actively block items such as alcohol, cigarettes/cigars/vapes from being listed on our platform. However, the restaurants highlighted were able to game our checks by using generic food names such as, ‘Naughty strawberry’, ‘Merry Berry’,” it said. “We have further strengthened our fraud checks to proactively identify such cases to avoid similar incidents in the future,” Zomato added.
Zomato’s comments come after eagle-eyed users on Reddit had discovered several restaurants in Chandigarh selling a single, strangely-named dish at high prices. A user, for instance, had shared a Zomato listing from a restaurant named “Desi Chinese” which was selling only one item — a “juice” named Naughty Strawberry for Rs. 999. Reddit users had speculated that these restaurants were fake, and were being used either for money laundering or to sell prohibited items.
It now seems that Zomato looked into the issue, and did indeed find a problem. Zomato has said that these were prohibited items that were being sold under fake names. One has to marvel at the audacity of the people behind this little scheme — they managed to cleverly list their prohibited items on a platform under fake names, managed to charge high rates for them, and even managed to use Zomato’s fleet to have them delivered across cities. And this simultaneously raises serious concerns about Zomato’s own checks and balances — if people were able to send prohibited items instead of food through its service, how should its users trust the quality and provenance of food that they order from it every day?