This is not really suspicious. I regularly went foraging for shrooms in Ukraine with my gram gram, but I was not allowed to pick anything, of course. It requires expertise. In that part of the world, this is very common, and so are the cases of people poisoning themselves because they think they are good at it. If you can't relate - think of all the "gun people" who think they are experts on gun safety and then they…
The people I feel for are the ones that change countries and mistake a deadly lookalike for what is an edible mushroom in their country. Google is letting me down but I believe something like this happened to a Vietnamese family in the UK.
The general rule here is that you only ever pick mushroom species somebody has thoroughly introduced you to - books and "I think we ate those at our friends house the other day" are considered quite reckless.