Taskforce Lunar is the operation Victoria Police set up in 2023 to take on the arson campaign that has burned through more than 200 tobacco and vape shopfronts across Melbourne. It is the largest and longest-running organised-crime taskforce the state has stood up since the Purana Taskforce of the early 2000s, and unlike Purana it has had to fight on three fronts at once — the people lighting the fires, the people contracting the jobs, and the import networks supplying the product that the wars are fought over.
This is our plain-English account of how Taskforce Lunar is structured, who runs it, how its arrests are sequenced, and what its public arrest tallies tell us about the state of the campaign.
Why the taskforce was set up
By the middle of 2023 it was clear that the wave of early-morning firebombings of Melbourne tobacco and vape shops was not going to be solved by ordinary Crime Investigation Unit work. The incidents crossed police regions. They linked back to organised-crime networks already known to the Crime Command. The forensic crossover between sites — stolen vehicles, accelerants, the same patterns of behaviour at the scene — pointed to coordination above the level of individual offenders. In August 2023 Victoria Police announced the establishment of a dedicated taskforce, named Lunar, with a brief to investigate the arson campaign and its organised-crime context.
Who is on it
Taskforce Lunar pulls together capability from across Victoria Police. In keeping with our policy on naming officers in active investigations, we use roles rather than names here.
- The taskforce’s commanding officer — a senior detective inspector seconded from Crime Command, with operational responsibility for the investigation as a whole.
- The Arson and Explosives Squad — the specialist forensic and investigative unit whose detectives examine fire scenes, recover accelerants and ignition devices, and reconstruct the sequence of events at each site.
- The Crime Command organised-crime units — the long-running squads with established intelligence on Melbourne organised-crime networks, who maintain the bigger-picture view of who is doing what to whom.
- Regional response teams — uniformed and plain-clothes police from the regions where attacks have been most concentrated, including the North West Metro and Southern Metro divisions.
- Intelligence analysts — civilians and sworn members who maintain the link analysis between offenders, vehicles, phones and venues across hundreds of incidents.
The multi-agency model
The taskforce does not work on its own. Two federal agencies sit alongside it, each with a piece of the picture that Victoria Police cannot see on its own.
The Australian Federal Police contribute organised-crime intelligence on networks that operate across state lines, money-laundering investigations linked to the cash flows from illicit tobacco retail, and liaison with offshore law-enforcement counterparts in the source countries.
The Australian Border Force handle the import side. Every container of chop-chop and every shipment of disposable vapes that enters Australia comes through a port that the ABF controls. Their seizure data, intelligence on rip-off crews at the docks, and the targeting work that decides which containers get opened, are all critical inputs into the taskforce’s view of the supply chain.
On the regulatory side, the taskforce coordinates with Consumer Affairs Victoria and with the new Tobacco Business Licensing Scheme as it stands up. State and Commonwealth excise interests are represented through Treasury and the Australian Taxation Office.
How arrests are sequenced
One of the more important things to understand about Taskforce Lunar is that it does not arrest everyone it could arrest, in the order in which they offend. It sequences. The taskforce’s working model, as Victoria Police has explained in public press conferences, is to start with the visible offenders — the youth recruits who actually light the fires — and then use those arrests to work upward through the chain to the people who arranged each job, and from there to the senior figures who directed the campaign.
That sequencing is not a quick way to clear cases. It involves long periods of covert investigation while obvious suspects are left in the open. It accepts that more fires may happen during the period in which an upper-tier target is being worked. The trade-off is that, when arrests at the senior end finally come, they come with the volume of evidence necessary to sustain a prosecution — and that the network behind the offending is more meaningfully dismantled than it would be by picking off recruits one at a time.
The public arrest tally
Taskforce Lunar has periodically released arrest tallies through its public communications and through Victoria Police press conferences. As reported in mainstream press, by early 2025 the taskforce had passed 100 arrests. Subsequent updates through 2025 and into 2026 have lifted that figure substantially — the most recent press tallies put it well above 200 — though not all those arrested are charged in connection with the arson campaign itself. Some are charged with related offences uncovered during the investigation: drug trafficking, firearms, money laundering, vehicle theft.
Those arrest figures need to be read carefully. They are arrests, not convictions. Many of the matters are still before the courts. Several have been adjourned long-term while related investigations continue. A subset of the alleged offenders are juveniles, with their matters dealt with in the Children’s Court under youth-justice protections that limit what can be reported.
What the taskforce has not been able to do
The honest assessment, on the public record, is that Taskforce Lunar has not yet broken the campaign. The pace of attacks has flattened — weeks now sometimes pass without a fire — but it has not collapsed. Senior figures named in mainstream reporting as alleged organisers of the campaign remain at large or remain on charges that have not yet resolved. The supply of teenage recruits has not run out.
What the taskforce has done is build a body of evidence and a set of investigative relationships that, on its own account, are now starting to deliver the higher-tier prosecutions that the public has been waiting on. Whether those prosecutions land, and how the courts treat them, will determine whether the taskforce’s model is judged a success.
How it intersects with other operations
Taskforce Lunar does not operate in a vacuum. It shares intelligence with the AFP’s ongoing organised-crime work, with the ABF’s import targeting, and with newer Victoria Police taskforces — including Taskforce Eclipse, set up in 2026 in response to the separate hospitality arson wave hitting Melbourne’s late-night precincts. We cover Eclipse in a companion piece. The networks at the senior end of both campaigns are not entirely distinct, and the taskforces are structured to share what they have learnt.
What we are watching
Three things in particular over the rest of 2026: the rate at which higher-tier prosecutions reach committal; the trajectory of the new state tobacco licensing regime, which gives police and Consumer Affairs an enforcement lever they have not previously had; and the sentencing outcomes for the youth offenders already convicted, which will tell us how the courts are weighing the recruitment-of-children offence introduced in 2024.
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Reported by Jack Renton, police rounds.
