DOJ Announces Guilty Plea in Mislabeled Crabmeat Case

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that Phillip Carawan pleaded guilty to falsely labeling crabmeat worth $4 million as a product of the United States despite being imported. Carawan and his company apparently could not meet customer demand and imported foreign crabmeat to cover orders for U.S.-produced crabmeat. “Seafood mislabeling is consumer fraud that undermines efforts of hardworking, honest fisherman and the free market by devaluing the price of domestic seafood,” the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a DOJ press release. “In this case, the fraudulent scheme artificially deflated the cost of domestic blue crab and gave Carawan an unacceptable economic advantage over law-abiding competitors.”