Best Posts in Thread: Fake cigarettes seized in Dumaguete

This has been a problem for years. I remember having to check the fine print on the Marlboro Reds. If the pack had solid lined bold numbers under the bar-code (instead of number drawn with tiny little dots) then the packs were fake and tasted like you were smoking a meth lab when you lit one up. Another way to tell was to put the pack under a black light. If the white part of the pack looked dim it was original Marlboro, if it glowed bright white it was the fake Chinese crap. Back then the hard packs were the safest bet (I assume because they are slightly more expensive to manufacture and not worth it for the Chinese assholes faking the packaging).

They raided Chinese ran fake cigarette manufacturing operations in Manila quite frequently back then.

They were all over the place a few years ago. You would get cartons of them in the Sari2x stores quite frequently. I taught several of the Sari2x store owners in Valencia how to spot them (they wanted to know why I stopped buying cartons from them) and the problem seemed to go away in short order. They are hard to spot to the untrained eye though.