Quote:
Originally Posted by barbourjay
well they didn't do a great job pressing them. rolling them is easy but getting them to keep the square foot and body is tough when you are rushing production. here's a few other pics.
these really are much better quality fakes and i believe that the bands and the ribbon are the real thing. someone at the factory is probably leaking them out or they are just taking them from the other cigars (as mentioned earlier about how easy it would be).
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Ick, yes, that is a bad pressing job. Looking at that cigar, it makes me wonder if a roller was even involved in this, or someone (ie: the shop) just took some existing torpedo with a similar looking wrapper and after possibly cutting the cigar down to size, just jury rigged up a half-assed pressing arrangement of some sort. Same wonder for the maduros, are those even custom rolled, or did someone just take some inexpensive maduro that comes in a cedar sleeve and swap the band (the sizes don't match up to a FFOXM, but the 5 Vegas Serie A was the first thing that came to mind looking at your most recent photo).
Anyway, if those are real bands, how many were made would likely give an indicator as to where the bands came from. Recycling bands from legitimate cigars is possible, but not practical for anything more than a small quantity of fakes, so for a large quantity, I'd lean more toward "smuggled out of the factory" or "stolen direct from the printers" - from my experience, bands normally come packed in boxes like what business cards come in - same quantities too- 200, 500, maybe even 1000. Then multiple business card boxes packed into larger cardboard boxes for transport. Probably not that hard to make one or two of the smaller boxes disappear.