STUTTGART – Organic cotton fraud in India has once again reared its head after an investigation by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) identified 20,000 metric tonnes of cotton that was wrongly certified as organic.
The systematic fraud discovered by GOTS, included the use of bogus raw cotton transaction certificates, false QR codes and a fictitious, cloned Indian government website that authenticate the ‘organic’ cotton fibre.
GOTS has since instructed its approved bodies to cancel all upstream transactions certificates based on these wrongly issued documents in order to prevent affected goods being sold with the GOTS label.
