Fraud involving olive oil has existed for thousands of years. Cuneiform tablets discovered at Ebla provide evidence of royal inspectors visiting olive mills to check on the production of olive oil. Even in Homer's day, EVOO was treated like "liquid gold."

The high gains from olive oil fraud provide criminals with a lot of motivation; in the mid- to late 1990s, earnings from contaminated olive oil were compared to those from cocaine trafficking.

When we use the word "fake," we simply mean something that isn't what it first appears to be. In the case of olive oil, this frequently refers to a product with misleading or incorrect labeling.

When olive oil is combined with other oils, it is one of the most popular ways it is sold fraudulently over the globe. While you may believe you are purchasing high-quality olive oil, in order to save costs, producers may blend olive oil with cheaper, lower-quality oils like soybean or vegetable oil.

Additionally, many bottles of olive oil have misleading labels that falsely claim they are "extra virgin" while in fact they are of lower quality. In fact, a National Consumer League study once showed that nearly half of the bottles tested from a few major retailers did not meet the requirements of the “extra virgin” label. Technically, extra virgin olive oil is oil that is low in acid and free of flavor and odor defects. While extra virgin olive oil is objectively superior, lower quality oil is much easier and cheaper to grow and harvest, persistent producers are motivated to mislabel and mislead.

Your olive oil can also be false in the sense that it doesn't originate from the place you think it does. In actuality, a sizable amount of olive oil labeled "made in Italy" is not produced there. Instead, it comes from Syria, Morocco, Tunisia or Turkey and is bottled and marketed as authentic Italian olive oil.