The Melbourne tobacco wars explained: how a black-market turf war became 200+ arson attacks

The phrase “tobacco wars” entered Melbourne’s vocabulary some time in 2023 and has stayed there. By the time our newsroom finished compiling its summer 2026 review, the running total of arson and attempted-arson attacks linked to the illicit tobacco trade had pushed past 200, almost all of them in Melbourne and its outer growth corridors. Few months have passed without another shopfront alight on the late news.

This is our plain-English explainer of how a fight over black-market cigarettes turned into the longest-running arson campaign in Victorian history, who is fighting whom, and what Victoria Police is doing about it.

Where the wars came from

The first of the now-familiar early-morning firebombings of tobacco and vape shops landed in March 2023, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. By the end of that year there had been roughly 50 such attacks. Through 2024 the pace accelerated; by mid-2025 the running tally was past 130; by early 2026 it cleared 200, with several weeks recording multiple incidents. The Crime Statistics Agency does not publish a dedicated “tobacco arson” series, but the Victoria Police count, repeated in mainstream press through 2025 and 2026, is the figure most commonly cited.

The pattern has been remarkably consistent across the 200-plus incidents. A car arrives in the small hours of the morning, often stolen from a different suburb the previous night. One or two offenders — in many cases teenagers — get out, smash the front of a tobacco or vape store with a hammer, splash an accelerant inside, light it and run. The car is abandoned and burned a few suburbs away. Forensic recoveries are difficult by design.

It is not really about cigarettes

The fires are about who controls distribution of illicit tobacco and vape product into Victorian retail. The product itself is straightforward — chop-chop loose tobacco, unbranded cigarettes that have evaded the Commonwealth excise, and disposable vapes imported in bulk from offshore manufacturing. The margins are extraordinary. A 50-gram pouch of legitimate cigarette tobacco retails north of $100 in Australia today, almost all of it excise. The same volume of chop-chop, landed at the dock, can cost a wholesaler under $5. Even after a long distribution chain takes its cut, the retail black-market price undercuts a legal pack by half or more.

That gap is the prize. The arson campaign is the mechanism by which competing organised-crime networks have tried to push rivals out of the supply chain — from importation through warehousing and on to the corner stores that sell the end product. A store that refuses to take a particular network’s product, or insists on stocking a competitor’s, becomes a target. So does a store whose owner has fallen behind on a debt, or whose landlord has refused a particular tenant.

The criminal economy underneath

Three categories of player have been publicly identified in mainstream reporting and in submissions to parliamentary inquiries:

• Established organised-crime networks — long-standing Melbourne crime families who already controlled a share of illicit drug distribution and have moved laterally into illicit tobacco because the margins are now better and the penalties softer.
• Outlaw motorcycle gang chapters — particularly active in distribution and in the standover side of the trade.
• Foreign-linked importation networks — bringing container loads of chop-chop and vape product through ports across south-east Asia and the Middle East.

None of these groups operate in clean isolation. The arson campaign has, on Victoria Police’s public account, been driven by a smaller number of senior figures contracting work outwards through layers of intermediaries to the people who actually light the fires.

The youth offender problem

One of the most distinctive features of this arson wave — and one we have written about in detail elsewhere — is the age of the offenders being arrested. Police, the Children’s Court and several judicial officers have all spoken publicly about the recruitment of teenage offenders, some as young as 14, through Telegram and Snapchat group chats offering cash rewards for arson jobs. Payments quoted publicly have ranged from a few hundred dollars for a smashed shopfront up to several thousand for a successful fire.

From the perspective of the senior figures behind the campaign, the logic is uncomfortable but obvious. Children carry less criminal history. They are sentenced under the youth justice framework rather than the adult one. They are less likely to have a long police record that could lead investigators back up the chain. They are also more available, more disposable, and easier to replace. The Victorian Parliament responded in 2024 with a new offence of recruiting a child for criminal activity — we cover the legislative detail in a companion piece on arson charges.

Taskforce Lunar

Victoria Police established Taskforce Lunar in 2023 in response to the first wave of attacks. By early 2025 the taskforce had publicly reported more than 100 arrests; further updates have continued through 2025 and into 2026. Taskforce Lunar pulls together detectives from the Arson and Explosives Squad, the Crime Command organised-crime units, regional response teams, and works alongside the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Border Force on the import side of the supply chain.

The taskforce’s working model, as set out in mainstream press conferences, is to sequence arrests deliberately — pick up the visible offenders first, work upward through the people who arranged the jobs, and aim eventually for the senior figures directing the campaign. That sequencing is the reason early arrests have skewed heavily towards the youth offenders who actually lit fires, with a slower trickle of charges against the alleged organisers further up the chain. We cover the taskforce’s structure and its multi-agency model in a separate explainer.

The geography

The fires have not been evenly spread across Melbourne. Hardest-hit precincts include Coburg, Brunswick, Sunshine, Footscray, Dandenong, Springvale and the Epping/Mill Park corridor — each of which has a dense cluster of independent tobacco and vape retailers along established shopping strips. Several fires have spread to neighbouring businesses; in at least one widely reported incident, residents above a targeted shop had to be evacuated through smoke. The cost to legitimate businesses caught next door has been substantial, and we cover that perspective in a separate piece.

Why it has been so hard to stop

Three structural problems sit underneath the campaign and explain why arrests — even the more than 100 publicly reported by Taskforce Lunar — have not turned the curve.

The first is the price gap. So long as legitimate cigarettes carry an excise approaching $1.30 per stick at retail, illicit product will sell. Several economists have argued publicly that excise policy itself has fuelled the market — an argument we will not adjudicate here, but one that has prompted federal Treasury to commission its own review.

The second is the structure of the criminal economy. Distribution networks are flat, replaceable and well-resourced. Take one out and another fills the space within weeks.

The third is the pool of available teenage labour. While young people are willing to take a few hundred dollars for an arson job — and while the courts continue to treat them, properly, as children — the supply of foot-soldiers will not run dry.

Where it sits in early 2026

Our newsroom’s read of where the campaign sits as we publish: the rate of attacks has not collapsed, but it has flattened. Taskforce Lunar arrests have continued to ladder up the chain. Federal action on imports has tightened the supply side. State legislation on retail tobacco licensing — long opposed by parts of the industry — is finally on the parliamentary agenda. None of that is a finishing line. It is the first sign that the arson curve might bend.

If you have information about an arson attack or about the illicit tobacco supply chain, Crime Stoppers takes anonymous tips on 1800 333 000. In an emergency call 000.

Reported by Jack Renton, police rounds.