Legal-looking packaging disguises Australia’s illegal tobacco trade.
The Australian government has been tightening its restrictions on illegal tobacco trade in the face of gang warfare and arson battles, but illegal traders continue to find new ways around the crackdowns.
Australia was the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products in 2012.
Black market ciggies can often be spotted because their packs remain unobstructed.
But as the ABC has revealed, Australian crime gangs are using fake plain packaging to throw authorities off the illegal scent.
Mass produced in Chinese factories and sold online at places like Alibaba, the packaging is surprisingly similar; the same yellow warning labels, hospital bed photos and slogans.
They retail for less than a dollar.
The clever tactics allow new ways for illegal tobacco to either go unnoticed at the border or go undetected by law enforcement raiding a shop.
The discovery comes after new laws in NSW allow police to shut down illegal tobacco traders and suspend their business for 90 days.
Stores are being regularly raided, with 52 stores already shut down in the last 6 months.
Australian Border Force are aware of the issue and state it “is not a new challenge.”
Australia’s illegal tobacco trade controls 50-60 percent of the market, valued somewhere between $4-6 billion.
Aside from the Government’s lost tax from legal tobacco trade, the growing illegal underbelly maintains a worrying hold on a dangerous market.
Based on these trends, Oxford Economics has predicted that within 3 years, organised crime will control almost 90% of the market.
The legal tobacco industry would almost collapse.
Fake plain packaging is just the latest in Australia’s tobacco battle, a never-ending saga that authorities are struggling to agree on how to quell.
