Cigarette gang busted in Cambodia; suspects, equipment return to China
Thirteen people suspected of being part of a transnational gang that manufactured and sold fake high-end domestic cigarettes worth more than 100 million yuan ($15 million), landed in Shanghai after a flight from Cambodia on Wednesday, police said on Thursday.
The cigarette-making machines used to produce the counterfeits were brought back with them, along with finished products of Chunghwa and Panda cigarettes.
The operation involved 47 Chinese citizens, according to police, and is the country’s first cross-border fake cigarette case to be resolved through international cooperation. Raids were conducted on Jan 15, the Shanghai police said.
At two production and storage sites, police in Cambodia seized 16 machines, including those for printing, die cutting, gold stamping, heat sealing and packaging. More than 2 million cigarette papers to be used in the counterfeits and more than 40,000 cigarettes not yet packaged were found at the sites.
The same day, officers raided local sites and captured 34 suspects. More than 20,000 cartons of cigarettes were found in the operation, which was aided by police in China’s Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
Pang Ercheng, a member of the investigation group assigned to Cambodia and deputy head of the economic crime detection team of Shanghai’s Jing’an district police, said the timing involved in capturing the suspects both at home and abroad was the main difficulty, as the people were scattered in various places.
He said a group of investigators from Shanghai arrived in Cambodia on Nov 25 and collaborated with local police.
A preliminary investigation found that the gang was led by a man surnamed Shi, who once manufactured counterfeit cigarettes in Fujian and Guangdong provinces from 2016 to early 2018. In February last year, the gang decided to transfer some of the production and processing arms abroad, as Chinese police continued to beef up anti-counterfeiting efforts.
The case began to unwind after the discovery of a cigarette shop in Shanghai’s Jing’an district that was selling suspicious cigarettes in January last year. Police discovered that the cigarettes had been purchased from a man surnamed Wang and a woman surnamed Diao, who had stored their counterfeit stock in a residential building in the city.
A transnational network, with which the two suspects in Shanghai were affiliated, surfaced as the police investigation went further. The gang had a clear division of labor in accounting, manufacturing, materials purchase, sales and logistics, the Shanghai police said.
Shi directed his wife, surnamed Sun, who was based in Shanghai, to take charge of the flow of funds of the entire criminal network, the police said.