£28K of wine stolen by Drogba conman

A conman pretending to work for Chelsea football star Didier Drogba has stolen £28,000 worth of wine from a two Michelin-starred restaurant in Cambridge.

The conman pretended to be Didier Drogba’s agent

As reported by the Evening Standard, the fraud sting happened this week at Midsummer House in Cambridge, run by chef Daniel Clifford.

A man claiming to be Drogba’s agent called the restaurant to book a table for six and pre-order £10,000 worth of wines for lunch the next day.

“They paid on their credit card and the payment went through having fulfilled all the normal security processes,” Clifford told the Standard.

The same man rang up later in the day to request another £18,000 of wine, including bottles of Château Lafite and Petrus, for a party that evening.

The restaurant agreed to send both wine orders, worth £28,000, to the address matching the credit card the fraudster provided. The wine was collected by taxi.

An hour later the conman struck again, attempting to order an additional £12,000 worth of wine, this time asking to pay in two transactions.

“We thought it was a bit unusual, but we thought that perhaps the footballer had more money than sense,” Clifford told the paper.

When one of the payments was declined by the credit card company, the restaurant cancelled the order.

Alarm bells ringing, Clifford called the taxi firm to check where the original wine order had been delivered to and was told it had been rerouted to a branch of McDonald’s.

This is not the first restaurant wine theft of its kind. Last week, db reported that con men pretending to work for wealthy Arab clients stole £11,500 of fine wine from Michelin-starred Fitzrovia restaurant Pied à Terre.