In 1918, the municipality of Aalten was defrauded of 60,000 guilders during the purchase of three wagons of hard soap that subsequently proved to be of worthless quality.

During World War I, the neutral Netherlands faced severe shortages of food, fuel, and numerous other goods. During the last two years of the war, a major shortage of soap also arose. Soap became scarce and expensive. The government intervened, partly because public health was threatened by the soap shortage. Soap factories were only permitted to produce so-called government soap. This could only be done sparingly, and therefore soap was rationed.

Sometimes fraudsters managed to pull off a major coup. The mayor of Aalten, A.J.W. Monnik, became a very naive victim of a well-known scam. On behalf of the municipal food company, he purchased three wagons of hard soap from a trader. The purchase price was ƒ 37 per crate. The local shopkeepers, who were to pay ƒ 40 per crate to the municipal food company, were then allowed to sell the soap for the retail price of 23 cents per 100-gram bar, which would have earned them a nice profit.

Worthless

But the plan fell through. It soon became apparent that the batch of soap had a very different composition than the sample the clever businessman had shown the mayor. The fatty acid content turned out to be only 10 percent, instead of the legally required minimum of 25 percent. According to the maximum prices established by the government in the meantime, such a bar of soap should only have cost 3½ cents.

It was no wonder that the housewives of Aalten left the shopkeepers stuck with their worthless goods en masse. The mayor had no choice but to take back the soap. The municipality bore the loss, which amounted to nearly ƒ 60,000.

Contradiction

Following this report, the firm De Fraiture & Co. in Breda, whose name was mentioned therein, declared that they knew neither the Mr. Tulp from Terborg mentioned as the seller nor the Food Company in Aalten. They also stated that they had never marketed bars of soap of approximately 100 grams and that, furthermore, they never manufactured soap with a fatty acid content lower than 20-25 percent. They were absolutely unaware of this matter. They suspected that a batch of their soap of the aforementioned quality or higher had been reprocessed into a poor quality by intermediaries.