Illegal cigarettes are so accessible in Australia vendors hardly even hide what they’re up to.

At less than half the price per pack than legally obtained cigarettes, the appeal is obvious. But where that money goes can be harder to track.

Take Fashion Spree, a cigarette and vape shop south-east of Brisbane half-heartedly masquerading as somewhere to buy clothes.

Many other shops like this rent their premises from a commercial landlord. But this Cleveland business is different: the owner of the building also owns the company selling the illicit product.

On a Monday afternoon, the bayside shop is busy, despite its operators being handed a three-month closure order the week before. Customers file out, black plastic bags in hand.

Inside, there are racks of Calvin Klein and Lululemon branded clothing, but a blacked out counter with an eftpos machine and a laminated vape list is centre stage.

Behind it, a young woman lists the cigarette options: just $13 for a pack of Marlboro’s, plus a $3 card surcharge.

The shop and the shopfront are owned by a group of linked companies that have purchased more than $8 million worth of Brisbane property in the past year.

This includes two apartments in the riverside Queen’s Wharf development attached to Star Casino, coming in at $2.5 and $3 million.

The company, Lifeline Holdings, also owns an industrial property at Willawong, in Brisbane’s south, and a five-bedroom home in southside Carindale, a few blocks from the Westfield.

All the properties have been bought since October 2025.

The company also owns two properties in western Sydney, including an apartment in Liverpool, where another company, Lifeline Holdings 2 is registered.

Lifeline Holdings 2 is the company that owns the shopfront used by Fashion Spree, in partnership with a trust called the ATF Khafaji Family Trust 2.

Fashion Spree itself is registered at the address of its accountant in a suburban house in Westlake, south-west Brisbane.

Its principal place of business is listed as a one-bedroom house near the Adelaide CBD in South Australia.

This masthead sent a series of questions for the director of the company to the accountant, who insisted they did not know about the cigarette shop. No response was received by deadline.

Enforcement of laws to stop illicit tobacco and vapes is the responsibility of several agencies across the country.

For example, Border Force is behind crackdowns on importing tobacco without paying the correct tax, but the tax office will prosecute those who are growing tobacco and selling it.

Stopping the shops mostly falls to state health departments with varying powers.

In Queensland, the health department can shut down shops found to be selling illicit nicotine products for three months on their own, and up to six months with a court order, as well as seize any nicotine products they find.

The most common way shops can be shut down permanently is through powers given to landlords in November last year, which allow them to kick out tenants selling the products.

Fashion Spree had been operating out of a shopfront in an industrial part of nearby Capalaba, before these powers were used to kick them out.

Queensland Health handed the Cleveland shop a 90-day short-term closure order on August 4, but when this masthead visited the shop six days later it was business as usual.

Under the legislative changes made in November, landlords who knowingly permit the sale of illegal tobacco can now face up to a year in jail or a $167,000 fine.

The department has been busy. In the 2025/26 financial year they conducted 2,800 inspections and handed out 300 closure orders, seizing more than $85 million in illicit products.

Professor Coral Gartner, an international expert on tobacco control at the University of Queensland, said Queensland has been heralded nationally for taking action against illicit tobacco retailers, but there was a lot more work to do.

She said the federal government should provide funding to state enforcement teams, and spend more on helping people quit in the face of rising smoking rates.

“State and territory governments need dedicated ongoing funds for this and shouldn’t need to rely on tobacco retail license fees to fund this work,” Gartner said.

Beyond this, she said pressure needed to be applied to countries producing the cigarettes to stop their flow to Australia in the first place.