Police seize £38,000 worth of illegal cigarettes and vapes in Warrington raids

07 October 2025 , 20:14

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Police seize £38,000 worth of illegal cigarettes and vapes in Warrington raids

Officers from the Constabulary’s Foreign National Offender (FNO) Unit and Protecting Vulnerable People Exploitation Teams (PVPE) joined immigration, HMRC, and Trading Standards colleagues in targeting stores across Warrington linked to immigration crime and the sale of illegal tobacco, vapes, and cigarettes.

On Thursday 2 October, officers from the FNO unit working alongside their colleagues from the PVPE team were deployed across Warrington under Operation Machinize - an ongoing coordinated operation launched by the National Crime Agency tackling money laundering, the criminal use of cash-intensives in high street businesses, and immigration crime.

Officers and their partner colleagues visited two shops in the Marsh House Lane area and uncovered sizable amounts of illicit and illegal products in the form of loose tobacco, illegal cigarettes, and vapes.

Additionally, these illicit products had been hidden in sophisticated concealments out of sight within the shops. However, thanks to the assistance of a specialist tobacco detection dog from Wagtail UK, the products were quickly identified and seized by officers.

A self-storage shipping container located near the Pink Eye roundabout in Warrington town centre was also revealed as another hiding place for illegal products, with nearly 4500 illegal vapes being found inside and subsequently removed.

In total, officers seized:

• 28,840 illicit cigarettes
• 22.65kg of illicit tobacco
• 4499 illegal vapes

The combined total of items seized from across the two shops equated to an estimated street value of £38,000.

An illegal worker was also arrested by immigration teams, and, later, a second person working within a shop on Orford Lane was arrested by officers on suspicion of public order offences.

James Smith

Editor-in-Chief