French authorities monitor violations and fraud as the Olympic Games approach

With the Olympics approaching, France’s anti-fraud services began detecting “small irregularities” related to services, such as misleading promises to consumers that they would receive home-cooked breakfasts, stay in hotels with false stars, or offer rooms for rent at unspecified prices. The committee affiliated with the Ministry of Economy responsible for consumer protection indicated that dishonest practices are linked at this stage mainly to the hotel sector.

The head of the committee, Sarah Lakosh, confirmed during a press conference that monitoring operations “will intensify before and during the Olympic Games activities” to ensure that the information given to consumers “is correct and that the products that will be sold to them are not counterfeit or dangerous.”

She added, “More than 4,000 monitoring operations were conducted” out of about 10,000 operations scheduled “in relation to the Olympic Games.” She continued, “Monitoring operations began at the beginning of the year because we wanted to know whether the food complied with established standards, and we detected small violations.”

Among the first violations observed in hotels were not displaying prices (at the reception or in the rooms), hotels with false stars, not having an airport transfer service despite it being displayed on the website, and posting good reviews online to hide the actual bad reviews.