Croydon Council trading standards team and HM Revenue and Customs have used specialist sniffer dogs to track down and seize illegal tobacco worth more than £175,000.
Barking: the council’s trading standards teams called in the dogs for their tobacco searches
Officers recovered 270,600 illegal cigarettes and 14.8km of hand-rolling tobacco from a storage facility last month.
Since the end of September, Croydon’s trading standards and HMR&C have seized more than 660,000 cigarettes and 375kg of hand-rolling tobacco, together reckoned to be worth £500,000.
The crackdown is part of Operation CeCe, a national campaign. The investigations are continuing.
Anyone who is prosecuted and convicted of being involved in selling or supplying illegal tobacco can face penalties including up to 10 years in prison and an unlimited fine.
If you have information about the sale of illegal tobacco in Croydon please report it via the Citizens Advice Consumer Advice line on 0808 223 1133.
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
- Inside Croydon: 3.3million page views in 2021. Seen by 1.6million unique visitors in that 12-month period
Ah. Love that dog!! Stories like these can be a bit of a drag, but you’ve done us proud. I’m a bit confused about this ‘storage facility’. Could it be anything like what we old timers used to call a warehouse? Or lock-up?
14.8kgs of hand rolling tobacco.
I’d like to see the size of that rizla.