Singapore Customs is clamping down hard on demand for illicit cigarettes at the street level to curb smuggling.

In the first six months of this year alone, it has booked a total of 3,084 buyers who purchased contraband cigarettes from street peddlers. The number caught was a four-fold increase over the same period last year, Singapore Customs said on Monday.

The number of peddlers nabbed also went up 20 per cent from 381 in 2006 to 456 in 2007.

'While Singapore Customs has stepped up enforcement efforts against smuggling syndicates, our actions will be more effective if consumers stop buying contraband cigarettes from illegal peddlers,' Director-General of Customs Teo Eng Cheong said.

In the first six months of the year, more than 2.5 million packets of duty-unpaid cigarettes were seized, up from 2.3 million seized in the same period last year.

The cigarettes fetched a total duty and GST of $18.8 million, higher than the amount from the first half of last year's haul of $17.5 million.

More were caught and compounded with duty-unpaid cigarettes, with the number rising 206 per cent to 11,036, compared to 3,601 during the same period in 2006. This figure is higher than the number from the whole of last year, which stood at 8,081.

Another 653 persons were charged in Court, up 28 per cent from the previous year.

The composition sum is at least $200 per packet for buyers of duty-unpaid cigarettes. The highest Court sentence for such customs offenders for the first six months of this year was a nine-year jail term.

From January to June, Singapore Customs foiled 96 cases of cigarette smuggling, each involving more than 10,000 packets of duty-unpaid cigarettes. This is almost 10 times the number of cases during the same period last year.

In April, 226,000 packets of duty-unpaid cigarettes were seized, the largest haul so far this year. Subsequently, seven syndicate members were each sentenced to a minimum of 25 months imprisonment for smuggling.

Singapore Customs also received more tip-offs. At 1,004 in the first half of the year, it is 264 more than in the same period last year.