Police smoke out fake cigarette gang
Thirteen suspects involved in the manufacture of fake cigarettes return to Shanghai from Cambodia on Wednesday evening.
Thirteen suspects involved in the manufacture of fake cigarettes were returned to Shanghai from Cambodia on Wednesday evening.
The suspects, rounded up in Cambodia on January 15, landed at Pudong International Airport at about 7:10pm.
Another 34 suspects were previously caught in China.
Police seized fake cigarettes, mainly high-end brands such as Chunghwa and Panda, and machines used to produce them, worth 100 million yuan (US$15 million).
Together with the city tobacco authority, police started an investigation last year after discovery that a grocery store in Jing’an District was selling fake cigarettes. A few thousand boxes had been purchased from two people for over 2.6 million yuan.
A gang ran factories in Fujian and Guangdong provinces from 2016 to February 2018, when manufacture shifted to Cambodia. The cigarettes were smuggled into China disguised as other goods.
The sophisticated gang had people specifically in charge of accounting, sales, manufacturing and logistics. Police discovered three assembly lines, 2 million pieces of fake packaging and over 40,000 cigarettes.
In 2018, Shanghai police solved over 500 intellectual property cases and caught over 1,100 suspects with over 500,000 fake products worth over 2 billion yuan seized.
Part of the fake Chunghwa cigarettes.
