Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson recently announced a legally binding agreement with a California-based company that was caught in a sweep of online vaping retailers. The company, E-Juice Vapor Inc., will pay $375,000 to resolve a lawsuit Ferguson brought in August 2020 after its initial refusal to cooperate with the investigation.
The resolution concludes the Attorney General’s Office 2019-2020 investigation into online vaping retailers. The Attorney General’s Office caught seven retailers violating Washington’s online age verification law. The seven retailers signed judgments requiring them to pay just over half a million dollars, which will go toward continued enforcement of Washington’s vaping product laws.
Unlike the six other companies, E-Juice Vapor did not cooperate in the initial phase of the investigation and did not provide information about its sales into Washington. Consequently, Ferguson filed a lawsuit in August 2020. E-Juice Vapor is paying more than the other six targets of the attorney general’s sweep because of its initial lack of cooperation and because its sales into Washington state were significantly higher than the other retailers.
“E-Juice Vapor illegally put profits over the safety of children,” Ferguson said. “We will continue to work with parents to keep nicotine products out of the hands of youth.”
Feguson’s lawsuit against E-Juice Vapor stemmed from a 2019-2020 sweep of online vaping sales by investigators from the Attorney General’s Office. After assembling a list of 148 online sellers of vapor products, the investigators posed as minors or used false identifying information to attempt to make purchases of nicotine-containing vapor products. Washington’s law requires stringent age verification for online sales of vapor products. For example, vapor product sellers must verify the buyer’s age using a third-party service to crosscheck and confirm the buyer’s identity.
Seven of the 148 online sellers illegally sold products to the Attorney General’s investigators without verifying the ages of the purchasers. Six of those companies previously signed legally binding agreements to change their advertising and online sales practices to comply with Washington’s law. The six companies that cooperated with Ferguson’s investigation agreed to pay the following amounts to the Attorney General’s Office:
VanVal Vapor, based in Spokane, paid $30,000
Zenith, based in New York, paid $50,000
Local Vape, based in Henderson, Nev., paid $25,000
Northland Vapor, based in Moorhead, Minn., paid $7,000
WOV, based in Castle Rock, Colo., paid $20,000
Vaping Zone, based in Columbia, S.C., paid $40,000
The sweep represents a continuation of Ferguson’s efforts to reduce youth access to vaping products. In 2016, Ferguson helped draft Washington’s youth access and online age verification law for sales. In 2019, he co-led the effort to pass legislation raising the purchase age to 21 for vapor and tobacco products. The new minimum age went into effect on Jan. 1, 2020.
In order to sell vapor products to Washington residents, retailers must do the following:
Clearly state Washington’s minimum legal age of purchase on their website
Use a third-party verification service to confirm the purchaser’s name, age and residential address
Verify the credit card information, and it has to match the information the purchaser provides
Get a signed certification from the purchaser, saying they are who they say they are, and they are of legal age to purchase vapor products
Include shipping documents that clearly state the package contains vapor products
Provide information about Washington law regarding the purchase of vapor products by minors
According to the Attorney General’s Office, none of the seven companies complied with these requirements. In addition, four of the companies did not have a license to ship these products to consumers.
E-Juice Vapor specifically advertised its products as similar to candy. Investigators discovered its “Candy King” vapor product line “profiled to suggest a flavor like Sour Patch Kids, Strawberry Sour Belts, Swedish Fish and Strawberry Watermelon Bubbalicious.” The description continued, “take a gander…you will see they look precisely like sacks of your most loved candy.”
