Cigars! Cigarettes! Cigarellos!

I received this via email today and thought, “Who in the holy hell would actually do this!?”

Then I thought there may be some hopeless nicotine addicts at Qt3 that could benefit from this type of financial windfall. So here it is, unedited (Bold added by yours truly):

How would you or a friend like to pay only $13.95/$15.95 a carton for cigarettes with free
delivery. Order
anytime you want and as many as you want. Brands
like: Marlboro, Salem, Camel, Winston, etc…There are no extra fees and this is not a scam. I
used to pay around $30.00 for 1 carton until I found
out this valuable information. Now I want to give you the same information for only $5.00. Think
of the
money
you’ll save just with 1 carton. If your interested
in saving lots of money please e-mail me back. I accept Paypal or moneyorders

Now, before you ask, I cannot just give out her email address here because she is giving me $1.00 for every person I refer to her.

So has everyone already seen this or did you all think I was serious in recruiting people for this nonsense? Or maaaaaybe it was to stupid and not worth the effort for a reply.

Yep, I’m going with the third one. :)

One of the most dangerous trucking jobs is to haul cigarettes. Sure, you can hijack a load of steel but it’s pretty hard to fence. However, stealing a semi trailer full of cigarettes is a highly profitable act of highway piracy. Makes me wonder if the spammer isn’t a fence for a truck-jacking ring.

I don’t think it’s legal.
You can’t, for example, travel to one state with lower cigarette taxes buy a bunch of cartons, and sell them in another state with high taxes. That’s illegal. You can’t sell cigarettes (to my knowledge) over the Internet. This is what the T in ATF stands for. So, yeah, this is a scam all right. Now, are you going to help those nice people in Africa who need to get that money out of their country or not?

That’s illegal. You can’t sell cigarettes (to my knowledge) over the Internet.

I buy cigars that way. they are 1/3 to 1/5 the price over the web as they are bought locally. If you can do it with cigars, it wouldn’t shock me if you could do it cigarettes. The Indian Nations I know do a huge traffic in cigarettes, since they don’t have to pay taxes.

I just know from convenience store signs, but are those prices not 50% off or more? Something smells fishy and it isn’t just the fetid air expelled from smokers who’s lungs are shriveled up like raisins.

The offer is to sell information, not cigarettes. This is the biggest clue that that is a complete scam. Hell, the information is might just be a recap of this thread:

  1. look for highway pirates that have jacked a truck load of cigarettes
  2. use the Internet to purchase tobacco
  3. visit Indian reservations to purchase tobacco products

Some internet businesses sell tobacco products and just don’t pay taxes. Some of these businesses are located on reservations and claim the taxes don’t apply. Others just ignore the taxes. NPR just ran a piece on this, but I can’t find it linked at the web site. I recall from the radio piece that the IRS has started working on these cases.

If that’s the same situation, the stuff is cheaper because they’re not paying taxes. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t comment on the justification or lack thereof. I’m just repeating what I heard.

Oh, wait. It clearly states in the spam that “this is not a scam.”

And by the way, the proper form is:

“Cigars, cigarettes, tiparellos…”

I knew somebody would catch it. I could not remember the exact phrase and suspected that was not it. Thanks Jessica. :)