Jamie Oliver asks cheese lovers to help catch thieves behind £300,000 cheddar scam

The celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has encouraged cheese lovers to help police catch scammers who defrauded a London dairy out of more than £300,000 worth of English and Welsh cheddar.Neal’s Yard Dairy, a distributor and retailer of British artisan cheese, delivered 22 tonnes of award-winning clothbound cheddar to the alleged fraudster posing as a wholesale distributor for a large French retailer before realising it had been duped.Oliver, 49, described the incident involving more than 950 wheels of cheddar as a “brazen heist of shocking proportions”.He told followers on Instagram to be alert if they heard anything about “lorryloads of very posh cheese” being offered “for cheap”, adding that the cheddar would have originally been worth about £300,000.The stolen cheeses were Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar, which have won a number of awards and are among “the most sought-after artisan cheeses in the UK”, Neal’s Yard Dairy has…