By Alan Lytle
Lexington, KY – The Fayette County Health Department is warning area restaurant owners and managers not to fall for a telephone scam making the rounds. Someone, purporting to be from a state or local health department, contacts the restaurant requesting an appointment for an inspection. If the establishment doesn't cooperate, the caller then threatens to levy a fine. Health Department spokesman Kevin Hall says that is not how restaurant inspections are handled.
"Number one, we don't collect any money on site. The only time that people pay money is when they come in to do their renewal fees and they come to do that on site. The main thing we want people also to remember is that we don't call ahead when we do inspections. We drop in twice a year because that gives us a truer sense of what the restaurants are doing."
Hall says the inspection request should be interpreted as a big red flag.
"If anybody gets a phone call ahead of time from the health department saying hey we're going to come out there and inspect you, that's not us, that's not the state. There's something wrong with that. They need to call and report it."
Scammers did something similar back in February and Hall says at that time, they appeared to be targeting ethnic-oriented establishments.