At Dodo’s Mini Market and vape shop on Endike Lane in Hull, Griff, a three-year-old brown and white springer spaniel, barks manically at a shelf of cough sweets and Mentos, his tail wagging in circles like a Spitfire propeller. Humberside police and Trading Standards officers have already found two bin liners full of counterfeit cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco in the ramshackle backyard, but they’ve called in the sniffer dogs in case there’s more.
Griff’s handler, Stuart Phillips, founder of Stu Phillips K9 detection services, combs the shelving unit with his fingertips until he locates two concealed screws. He removes them, pulls slightly against a magnetic catch, and a secret door swings open to reveal hundreds of packets of fake cigarettes and tobacco pouches. Carefully stacked in packs of 20 and branded Richmond and Platinum, they look exactly like the originals. As with the fake Turner pouches of roll-up tobacco they have already discovered, they even carry health warnings, from “Smoking seriously harms you and others around you” to “Smoking is highly addictive, don’t start”.
The officers cheer. “That’s trebled the haul,” Phillips declares. He and Griff are in the front line of a battle being fought by UK authorities against what Phillips describes as a “pandemic” of counterfeit cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco being sold through vape shops and mini supermarkets. The tobacco inside is real — but cheap and of low quality, generally grown in and imported illegally from China.
The smuggling of cheap cigarettes into the UK duty free is nothing new, but now a criminal industry of dangerous fakes is on the rise. Some £5-£6 billion of illegal tobacco is thought to be sold in the UK every year, only about £3 billion less than government estimates for the value of the entire British narcotics industry. Fake versions of famous brands now make up 60 per cent of all the illicit tobacco trade.
Tobacco is grown legitimately in many countries, the main producers being China, India, Brazil and the US, and to a lesser extent countries in south and southeast Asia. The raw tobacco in counterfeit cigarettes is often Chinese waste product not good enough for the legal manufacturers to use, according to private investigators employed by big tobacco companies. The investigators say workers in the illegal factories will commonly sweep tobacco from the floor or around the dirty machines to maximise the yield. It can be mouldy and sometimes even contains traces of mouse and rat droppings, asbestos dust and a fast-breeding pest called a tobacco worm. Unlike legal cigarettes, they do not use self-extinguishing paper that stops burning if the smoker stops puffing on them, making them an increased fire hazard and even more unhealthy than the real thing.
After interviewing dozens of UK and European police officers, Trading Standards and HMRC officers and tobacco company executives and investigators, The Sunday Times can reveal how a global organised crime industry run by networks of Chinese triads and Kurdish and eastern European crime gangs has taken over the illegal cigarette market in the UK.
Croydon’s Marlboro cowboys
Buying illegal tobacco products has never been easier — as I discover in Croydon, south London. On London Road, a few hundred yards from Marks & Spencer and Greggs, is a scruffy jumble of international grocery stores, hairdressers and vacant shops — a familiar scene in most big British towns. Among them, Top 1 Mini Market’s garish orange frontage sticks out between empty premises and an estate agency. It has flags of the world on the fascia and a neon sign declaring “vape shop”.
When I ask the friendly young man inside for “cheap cigs”, he knows exactly what I mean. He asks me what type and lifts up a laminated sheet partially taped to the counter to reveal a hidden menu beneath. There are photos and price tags for more than a dozen brands, from Marlboro to Silk Cut, for sale between £4.50 and £7 for 20 — a far cry from the £16.60 that smokers in Britain legally pay these days, on average.
Organised crime groups have targeted Britain because it has the third highest taxes on tobacco in the world after Australia and New Zealand. In the UK about 80 per cent of the cost of a packet of cigarettes is made up of tax. As one Trading Standards officer says: “It’s just what happens when you get prohibition — the criminal gangs move in.”
I pass over my tenner, the shop assistant reaches below the counter and a pack of Marlboro Red, labelled “duty free”, complete with red triangular branding and health warnings, is mine, with £5.50 change.
Later, a forensics team at Philip Morris International, Marlboro’s owner, examines the pack at a lab in Poland and confirms it is counterfeit — they have found the same type being sold across continental Europe.
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Police say tobacco crime in the UK is spreading partly because of the number of high street shops that have been going out of business since the pandemic. The availability of retail properties at cut-price rents has allowed gangs to open hundreds of new vape shops and minimarkets. The retail analytics company Green Street shows a net 300 vape stores opened in 2024, on top of 183 the previous year.
For the same reason the largely Kurdish gangs running the shops have also opened cash-only barbers nearby, where officials suspect the thousands of pounds a week made per shop can be laundered. In late March The Sunday Times reported on a series of raids up and down the UK staged by the National Crime Agency on cash-only Kurdish and Turkish barber shops.
Crooked carpenters
Criminals are becoming ever more sophisticated in their concealment techniques. When I join the police dogs on their raids in Hull, Cooper, a fox red labrador, sniffs out a whole fake wall at a vape shop that opens and closes on hydraulics at the press of a remote control button. Behind the wall is a large cabinet designed to hide thousands of pounds’ worth of cigarettes and pouch tobacco, though this one has been emptied.
“There’s £5,000 to £10,000 of work here,” says Phillips, who handles Cooper as well as Griff. “It’s a sign of how much profit these guys are making that they’re prepared to invest this kind of money.”
A cottage industry of crooked cabinet-makers has sprung up to provide such “concealments”, as police and Trading Standards officers call them. One, based near the south coast, has bragged to friends of “making a fortune” from vape shops.
Criminals will stop at little to protect their trade. In 2018 police warned Phillips that the gangs had taken a £25,000 contract out on the head of one of his sniffer dogs, Scamp. At several premises I observed being raided in Hull, young men loitered outside videoing the plain cars of the Trading Standards officers and dog handler. At one shop they photographed the Sunday Times vehicle from their car.
Trading Standards officers say this is a regular practice. One, based in another city, says his officers found tracking devices had been placed on their cars. “I’m not sure if they’re tracking when we’re coming or finding out where we live, but it’s unsettling. These are not nice people.”
A nationwide problem
Dave Ellerington, head of Trading Standards in Newcastle upon Tyne, says of the surging number of fake cigarette shops in his city: “It has exploded. There were none here 10 years ago, now there’s 100. It’s not fair on the legitimate shops when the neighbours are undercutting them like this.”
The Hull Trading Standards officer Alan Bentham says he has raided at least 80 vape shops and minimarkets selling counterfeit tobacco. Over recent months these outlets have spread from the poorer suburbs to Hull city centre, suggesting that the gangs are prepared to take on higher risks to chase bigger profits.
In Brighton John Peerless, a veteran Trading Standards officer, says tobacco has taken over from scammers’ call centres — which have plagued the city and much of the south coast — as the biggest area of investigation for his team.
Profits are immense, yet the penalties if caught selling, making or smuggling fake cigarettes and tobacco pouches are mild — often a fine or a light suspended sentence. HMRC estimates that tobacco crime came at a loss to the taxpayer of VAT and duty worth £2.8 billion in 2021-22 alone — more than the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced for additional defence funding.
Meanwhile, the availability of cigarettes at such low prices has made smoking affordable to children again. The antismoking campaign group Action on Smoking and Health Wales found a third of children who were smoking in the country said they had been offered illegal cigarettes, and a quarter had bought them.
Where do the fake fags come from?
In a grim, strip-lit office with tiny windows a few hundred yards from Southampton’s docks, a small team of investigators from British American Tobacco (BAT) — makers of a number of cigarette brands including Dunhill, Kent, Lucky Strike, Pall Mall and Rothmans — try to keep track of the gangsters. Maps of Europe and the Middle East on the walls are studded with coloured pins indicating seizures and smugglers’ routes, while a bank of library shelves on rollers contains files of evidence.
The lead investigator, a stocky former detective dressed in a leather bomber jacket and jeans, says counterfeit factories supplying the UK had changed significantly since Covid. “They used to set up mainly in eastern Europe,” he says. “But Covid lockdowns interrupted their supply lines to western Europe and the UK. So the gangs have been opening up in places like Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.”
On his laptop he has videos of factories in Naples in Italy, in Poland and elsewhere, and he tells stories of cigarette-making factories in compounds in central Asia with armed guards and lookouts on the road.
His team in the UK analyse packs seized by officials to ascertain whether they are fake, and use forensic techniques to assess where they were made. One officer, surrounded by evidence bags from a recent raid, was taking apart a fake Benson & Hedges cigarette carton to examine the cardboard and foil. As well as the tobacco, the packaging, paper and filters are generally all made in China and shipped or air-freighted to factories in Europe where the cigarettes are assembled.
“Each packaging machine leaves a unique mark,” explains the woman unfolding the carton — like the marks on a fired bullet and cartridge. “Machinery from one raid will often turn up somewhere else a couple of years later.” Cigarette-making equipment is “easy to buy on social media”, the chief investigator says.
The Belgian sweatshop
On a light industrial estate in the rural Belgian town of Lommel, at 5.30pm on Thursday, February 20, the peace of the chilly evening was shattered. An armed unit of 35 specialist customs officers and local police in 15 vehicles swooped on a dull grey warehouse, acting on intelligence that it was being used to make illegal cigarettes. They were getting used to such work. Last year they raided and shut down 12 operations making fake cigarettes to export primarily to Britain and France.
But this was something else. Inside officers found no fewer than four full-size production lines manned by 51 workers, mostly from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The factory had been operating 24/7, producing millions of cigarettes a day. A total of 30 million were found on the premises. It was the biggest Belgian seizure yet.
Florence Angelici, of Belgium’s Ministry of Finance, says the sheer scale of the factories points to wealthy international crime gangs. “The cost of the installation of one illicit production line is €500,000 minimum. They also need to rent the premises and provide vehicles. The amount of money invested indicates that suspects higher up the hierarchy of the organised crime group are running their illegal business all over Europe and pulling the strings from another location.”
The workers arrested in the factories are low in the pecking order — and are often victims themselves. “There are links to human trafficking groups,” Angelici adds. “Some are kept in terrible conditions with no daylight, no phone, doors locked and air polluted by the stored tobacco.”
The gangs are becoming more violent, both internally and with each other, she says. Sometimes officers find weapons at the factories similar to those they often see in raids on drugs labs or cannabis plantations.
Smuggling the smokes to Britain
Having been made on the Continent, packs of cigarettes are smuggled into the UK at ports and airports, in shipping containers, lorries and suitcases. The trade through airports is so rife that Border Force is training sniffer dogs to detect tobacco as well as drugs and cash.
Not all cigarettes smuggled into the UK are fakes. A minority are legally bought in lower-tax jurisdictions in eastern Europe and illegally driven over the borders by lorry drivers, evading the duty.
Gangs advertise for drivers willing to take the risk of smuggling them on Facebook and other social networks. A post on Cigarettes Europe Sigaretten — one of several tobacco importing groups I found on Facebook — reads: “Hi. Looking for truck drivers travel EU-UK. Good profit.” A thriving black market across the UK and Europe sees members of this and similar groups on the social media site offer to buy or sell illegal cigarettes every day.
When The Sunday Times sent a selection of these messages to Facebook, it removed the posts and said it did not allow content promoting the sale of tobacco-related products except for brands promoting them to over-18s.
The trade in ‘illicit whites’
Another type of non-fake tobacco being illegally sold in the UK are so-called “illicit whites”. These cigarettes are given their own brand names by their manufacturers, avoiding legal challenges over intellectual property. They are often made in legitimate factories in places such as Belarus, but specifically to be sold by the company or its agents to smugglers to avoid tax.
One of the biggest manufacturing areas of whites sold in the UK is Dubai’s vast tax-free port, the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Twenty-two miles southwest of Dubai, it has been highlighted by Interpol for its key role in making and exporting whites. While the manufacturing in Dubai is legal, the distribution of the whites around the world without paying the relevant taxes is not. The lucrative distribution trade, investigators say, is commonly operated by organised crime and terrorist groups with existing smuggling networks in the region, such as the Houthis, currently harrying international shipping in the Red Sea with missile and drone attacks.
Brands of whites including a legitimate Dubai-made cigarette range called Manchester have illegally flooded into the UK in recent years.
Enter the Chinese Snakeheads
While fake cigarette manufacturing is a Europe-wide problem, counterfeit hand-rolling tobacco is a very British affair. More than 20 per cent of smokers in England roll their own, making them the biggest roll-up users in Europe.
Leading pouch tobacco brands such as Amber Leaf and Samson are counterfeited in huge numbers by gangs in many British cities — an operation run largely by Chinese organised crime groups, according to investigators. The gangs smuggle in the raw tobacco in secret hides in vans or containers from Europe. The fake packaging comes in from China, often distributed to Chinese restaurants, where it is later collected. The pouches are assembled and sealed using slave or indentured labour across Britain, in houses, on industrial estates and even in disused churches. One suspected leader in the UK, from the infamous Snakehead gang, told an undercover investigator that each of his workers could make 1,000 pouches of tobacco a day. He also talked of having worked in brothels and sold cannabis.
Dave McKelvey, a former Metropolitan Police officer who now runs TMEye, a private detective agency whose clients include Japan Tobacco International, the maker of Benson & Hedges, has been investigating one Chinese gang for six years. Describing how they operated out of properties from southeast London to Scotland, he says: “It is without doubt the most sophisticated organised crime network I have seen in my career.”
The Snakehead gang are notorious people smugglers from China’s Fujian province and speak a local dialect, he says: “They’re very close, very insular and very hard to infiltrate.”
Between April 2022 and March 2023 HMRC Overseas and Inland and Border Force seized 1.15 billion cigarettes, and in the first two years under a new initiative aimed at disrupting shops launched in 2021, more than 28 million illicit cigarettes and eight tonnes of illicit hand-rolling tobacco have been seized. HMRC says it secured prison sentences totalling 148 years against 107 cigarette and tobacco fraudsters between April 2023 and March 2024.
However, while HMRC stresses it has increased the amount of money going into tackling illicit tobacco, several private investigators are critical of the lack of resources given to arresting those further up the chain of command in tobacco gangs.
McKelvey and his team have been pursuing private criminal prosecutions. Many are ongoing and subject to reporting restrictions, but they include at least one Snakehead leader known as Mr Ho.
TM Eye and other private investigators work with local police forces to raid properties across the UK. One raid at a suburban 1930s terraced house in Leyton, east London, found a shed in the back garden in which a Chinese man was living. It had been kitted out with a bathroom and a tiny bedroom where the police found wardrobes full of bags, suitcases and boxes containing counterfeit Amber Leaf tobacco pouches along with packs of fake Benson & Hedges, Lambert & Butler and Marlboro cigarettes. Hidden in two faux leather sofas were more counterfeit cigarettes and a large stash of what appeared to be fake Viagra.
“They have such a sophisticated network built up for the tobacco trade that we believe they are now moving other contraband through it, including [the narcotic] fentanyl,” McKelvey says.
One former detective, now working under contract for a tobacco company, joined a police raid on a hidden room at the back of a site masquerading as a factory in the Darlaston area of the West Midlands. Breaking open the door, they found three Chinese men and a woman, all of them naked, filling and sealing tobacco pouches.
“They said the boss made them work with no clothes on to prevent stealing, and that the woman had to provide sex for the men,” he says. Accounts of ill-treatment of workers by tobacco gangs are legion, particularly of women who say they were forced to have sex with their traffickers.
The hunt for Mr Big
Although a packet of cigarettes at £4 or £5 may sound cheap, the profit margins for the gangs are still immense — the cost of production using slave or cheap labour is a few pence a packet. A sales document seen by The Sunday Times for a Belarussian factory that makes “white” brands such as Minsk — widely sold illegally in Britain — offers them for sale at just 12 to 18 US cents for a pack of 20. That makes for a retail profit margin of about 98 per cent, compared with about 78 per cent for heroin. “You can see why criminal gangs are drawn to it,” says Stuart Phillips, the dog handler. “And there’s a very low risk of going to jail.”
That said, he tells me this at Dodo’s store in Hull at the very moment that the shop’s former owner — as registered at Companies House — is handed a prison sentence, 93 miles away, of three years and eight months for selling illegal cigarettes and vapes in Lincolnshire, Birmingham and Derbyshire. Amin Ismail Amin, 53, had been spared jail in 2021 for the same offences, but this time, at Derby crown court, Judge Jonathan Straw is in no mood for leniency, saying: “The motivation behind your offending is easily and succinctly explained — financial greed.”
However, Amin is not thought to be one of the Mr Bigs of this criminal world. More likely he was paid by those higher up the gang as a fall guy to lend his name to the businesses. Many of the vape shops and minimarkets raided by Trading Standards are run by people of Kurdish origin. Officers say most appear to live fairly humbly in the UK, although senior gang members may have large houses in their homelands of Turkey, Iraq, Syria or Iran.
In one police investigation in Nottingham in 2018 officers were told they were not welcome on a “Kurdish street” in the Radford Road area. Following a raid on a grocery shop, a failed asylum seeker was found trapped in a cellar tasked with handing up cigarettes to the shop above.
Fake vapes — the next frontier
At the Titan container park near Hull’s docks, Griff strikes gold again. Tail in a frenzy, he starts biting the locked metal doors of a royal blue unit of the type you see on the back of lorries and ships.
Phillips busts open the industrial padlock with his power tools. Instead of tobacco he finds dozens of cardboard boxes of illegal jumbo-sized vapes — another growing business for the crime gangs. They come in from China, where they are often thought to be made by the same manufacturers as smaller legal ones. Selling at about £10 each, the haul Griff uncovers has a street value of £33,000.
In the centre of the Leicestershire market town of Melton Mowbray there are no fewer than four vape shops and two European minimarkets. The Juice-E-Vaporium vape store in the shopping centre behind Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe looks reputable, with “over 18” age warnings stuck up on the windows beside advertisements for the local fête. The store has been here for 11 years, run by the manager Jay Parr — chatty, tattooed and with half-inch hoops stretching his earlobes.
He is frustrated at less legitimate shops springing up in the county. Juice-E, he says, has only ever sold 2ml-a-puff vapes — the UK standard — but others sell them in 20ml sizes: “There are a lot of places that will have anything you want behind the counter. Ask for it, they’ve got it. And because it’s counterfeit you’ve no idea what’s in them.”
They are also vastly undercutting legitimate sellers. The contraband vapes, he says, are mostly disposables, which on June 1 will be banned in the UK on environmental grounds. Parr stopped selling disposables long ago, but when he did sell them they were £6.99. Illicit vapes sell for half that, he says.
Will the ban on disposables end the trade? Hardly, Parr says: “Make it illegal and the black market will just get more lucrative.” And that is the key problem. Until people stop asking for their products, the fake tobacco gangs will prove impossible to stub out.
