Richard Ross
speaker
110 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Richard Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Science Weekly · Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode three – a bag for life · 23 Jul 2026
podcast
The wholesaler explained that most of this business was conducted by email.
An order would be made and then payment would be forthcoming and he would send to an address in Glasgow, actually, just up the street, this very street that we're on now, actually.
But the one occasion when he did actually meet him face to face, Tam came to his business premises in London and paid him cash for several kilos of a white peony tea.
And the date of that was literally the week after the press visit to my plantation that precipitated the delivery of this bucket of tea two weeks later.
The office manager was sending emails, signed off with a kiss at the end.
And this is somebody that none of us had ever met.
We were joking amongst ourselves that this was a little bit odd and that it was a little bit sort of forward perhaps.
And then we even joked that maybe this is just Tam pretending to be this person.
He'd taken the name of a genuine person who had had some dealings with him in the past and used that to pretend that he had this larger team and also just to fend off inquiries and requests.
He gave us these protective tubes, the kind of tubes that the trees have put in beside the road, which he suggested would be excellent for helping to, as he described it, force the plant.
He likened it to growing rhubarb under the sink in your kitchen.
It was a relief to an extent.
I mean, it was a pretty unambiguous verdict.
But the whole psychology of the fraudster, I think, is baffling and fascinating.
It feels like he couldn't have done all the things he did and maintained this level of lie and fabrication over a period of years without somehow just believing that it was normalized and he was doing something that wasn't really out of the ordinary or out of the legal process.
He created this network that was sort of self-perpetuating to a degree.
And I think ultimately not enough people knew what was involved in tea to be able to point the finger directly.
And yes, he told a lot of strange stories, which in retrospect, and when you add them all up together,
seemed pretty preposterous but he was always quite good at leaving a little kernel of truth somewhere in the middle of the stories he told something that you couldn't quite say well that's wrong you think well I know that little bit is right so maybe I'm just missing something here maybe he is an absolute genius and nobody kind of wants to be the person who sort of pricks the balloon
Yes, nobody was aware of the full picture.
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