It’s not often that “catfishing,” the act of creating a fake identity online to deceive someone, involves actual catfish.

But that’s the matter under investigation by sheriff’s deputies on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Katie Olson, an account manager at Tilghman Island Seafood, works hard to guard against fraud. She doesn’t like anonymous emails. She wants to call a buyer or match a name to a website.

And when a big order came in last year, for $90,000 of Chesapeake Bay catfish, everything seemed legitimate to her — at least at first.

The phone numbers checked out. The emails seemed to come from McCain Foods. Even the name on the order matched an executive at the multinational frozen foods company.

Olson couldn’t have known that that executive had recently retired.

“This was very sophisticated,” she said.

With fraud across the food industry, there are plenty of reasons to be wary. Just two months earlier, in October 2024, a famous London cheese retailer revealed that it had been conned out of some $395,000 worth of rare cheddar. The thieves had impersonated a French company, ordering more than 950 wheels of the artisan cheese.

The World Trade Organization last year published its first report on food fraud and illicit trade, putting the global costs of the crimes between $30 billion and $50 billion a year.

In the Chesapeake Bay, catfish is more than just business. A species native to the Ohio and Mississippi River watersheds, blue catfish were released into lower bay tributaries by Virginia wildlife officials in 1974. At the time, the rockfish population was crashing, and officials wanted a new trophy for anglers.

The number of catfish has since exploded.

The Deep South river monsters stormed their way up the bay, eating just about everything in their path and growing big — some more than 100 pounds. Today, researchers estimate the invasive species accounts for as much as 70% of the fish biomass in some bay tributaries. They are blamed for devouring everything from rockfish to crabs.

For Tilghman Island Seafood owner Nick Hargrove, getting into the blue cat business was a gamble, but he believes that without a major processing industry on the Chesapeake, these fish will take over the bay.

Scientists and state officials hope that if the region can develop an appetite for catfish, it could eat its way out of the problem. Federal and state agriculture officials visited the Eastern Shore packing house earlier this to announce new grant funding to help kick-start a Chesapeake catfish processing industry.

For now, though, Hargrove’s outfit remains one of two blue catfish processors on the Eastern Shore and the largest, he believes, in Maryland.

“I thought we could help the cause,” said Hargrove, but contending with the seafood black market doesn’t make that job any easier. “When something like this comes along, it sets you back.”

The order last December was for 20,000 pounds of catfish fillets, and it came in with names and signatures of McCain Foods executives. The delivery location was in a strip of warehouses in the Bronx, New York, not far from the Fulton Fish Market.

But the truck of catfish pulled up to an apparent active investigation site. A video by the truck driver shows FBI agents in the street and stopping other cars and trucks. The federal agency was carrying out a raid in the area, a Talbot County sheriff’s deputy wrote in a police report.

It’s unclear which location the agents were searching in the block of warehouses. An FBI spokesperson in New York declined to comment, citing bureau policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.

The frozen catfish from the Chesapeake was redirected into cold storage, according to the police report, and then the buyer had the shipment delivered to another warehouse nearby.

When Olson tried to collect the $90,000 bill, her emails went unanswered. The phone numbers stopped working. Tilghman Island Seafood had been swindled.

The case remains under investigation by the Talbot County Sheriff’s Office. The matter came to light recently because of an insurance lawsuit filed by Tilghman Island Seafood as the company tries to recover its losses.

The lawsuit is ongoing in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

Hargrove assumes he won’t ever get to the bottom of the catfish con. He figures the fillets were loaded into a shipping container and sent overseas.

It was a big loss for Tilghman Island Seafood, but a little crime in the scheme of things. Hargrove doesn’t expect the FBI to give much of a chase.

“I don’t know what their priorities are,” he said, “but I’m sure it’s a small fish.”