How Nova Poshta makes money from gigantic cigarette smuggling flows

Do you know what is the cornerstone of any commodity criminal scheme? Her Majesty "Logistics".

Moving goods safely from point “A” to point “B”, even within the country, is another challenge. Especially when the product is illegal, valuable, prohibited, etc.

In the illegal tobacco issue, this is even more relevant, because the product is both valuable, illegal, and excisable.

Any police checkpoint, or random patrol, or someone else stops your truck with cigarettes and that’s it... Detention, confiscation and loss of cargo. Or maybe a car.

How lucky?

A truckload of cigarettes costs 200–400 thousand dollars. + the same amount of lost potential income, so you can’t risk such amounts. But you need to carry it.

That is why the illegal tobacco smuggling market is divided into influence groups not only by region, but also by direction, taking on the corresponding risks.

Someone brings cigarettes to Odessa from the UAE by sea, someone delivers them across the country to points of sale, someone broke through a window in the EU and pulls them through Tisa, someone runs kiosks in Kyiv... there are many options, but everyone is involved, everyone makes their own markup for a “piece” of work, but almost never one group does everything at the same time

But at some point the logistics problem solved itself, because we had delivery services to which everything “moved”. Including everything illegal.

Border checkpoints for receiving “parcels” have been literally packed for seven or eight years now with goods that have just illegally crossed the border past customs in small beads. Products from Italy, wheels from Poland, etc. Also, hundreds of boxes of cigarettes arrive at border checkpoints, which are then bought by local residents and taken to Poland. Logistics in both directions.

In the city of Vladimir, in Volyn, the main wholesale warehouse for the sale of illegal cigarettes is located in the same room as the largest warehouse of Nova Poshta. I filmed a story about this once, so I know what I’m saying.

It was delivery services that at some point became the rescuers of smuggled logistics of illegal excisable goods. There is no need to risk a truckload of cigarettes that could be confiscated. We send everything by Nova Poshta and in branded red trucks, with a guarantee of safety, the goods are on site at the exact time.

In any case, I have no complaints about NP, which is a cool company and does a lot to win.

I'm just saying it as a fact. Fully aware of what exactly they are accepting for delivery, they simply make money, turning a blind eye to their obvious participation in a criminal scheme.

Why am I writing about this now? Because in today's release of the BEB there is a clear recorded fact of such use of carriers.

“The vast majority of shipments of illegally produced tobacco products were carried out by a well-known delivery service. A large quantity of cigarettes without excise tax stamps was found at one of its branches.”

That is, near one of the TOP illegal factories, and, most likely, there is one near each one, a branch of Nova Poshta was opened, which the criminals turned into their logistics hub, thereby solving the problem of the damned logistics of illegal excisable goods.

And everyone saw everything, and the goods were accepted and delivered.

But one more time.

This is not a problem with Nova Poshta, nor is it an attack on them.

This is a problem of the lack of rules of the game and the strong-willed decision of the owners of Nova Poshta not to transport such goods, not to accept them for shipment, and not to participate in criminal tobacco schemes.

Perhaps some rule of law needs to be changed, I don’t know.

But this is the problem and we definitely need to pay attention to it.