Fair Go: Kids get vapes delivered straight to their front door

There's no question that vaping has a grip on too many of our young learners.

And Fair Go has found that with vape sales online, every mobile phone, every laptop, in every bedroom is also a vape shop - and one that many kids are accessing.

Despite the signs at stores and laws and fines of up to $10,000 for selling to under 18's, kids are getting hold of vapes via the internet and courier services - it's just way too easy.

Patrice Morris could be any mum with a teenager. Her boy got hooked at 13, and she described to Fair Go the horrors of coming off nicotine.

"Horrible hot sweats, not sleeping, anger, flipping out at parents, flipping out at siblings, not concentrating at school ... it's just sabotaging themselves, really."

Patrice reckons, "It's the law that's allowing this to happen and the lack of any form of control."

Patrice says hacking the payment method was the key to uncovering the source of this trouble.

"I found a Prezzy Card in the rubbish bin, and being the mum I am, I thought 'woah, I haven't seen that', so I picked it out of the rubbish bin, had a look at the code, searched it online, had a look at the transactions, and there was a transaction at Shosha online."

Fair Go asked Patrice to try the purchase again, this time with a camera keeping watch at the door. And sure enough the courier turned up, package in hand, and there it is, chucked over the fence.

This was a vape cartridge – R18 - which should not be left for just anyone to collect.

So what's failing? What are the rules? And how are vape companies applying them?

Fair Go tested four online sellers - two which Patrice had tested and which failed - and two more for comparison.

To prevent online sales to minors, the regulators encourage five steps.

One: The website has an R18 declaration on entry.

Two: Proof-of-age documents are verified by a staff member before payment is made by the customer - only one company asked that.

Three: The retailer ensures the delivery name aligns with the name on the payment method. Well, you can put anyone's name on a Prezzy Card, or no name at all, it's like paying cash online.

Steps four and five are that all deliveries are meant to be signature only, and, retailers must use R18 courier services - where IDs are checked at the door.

But Fair Go's little haul from online vape stores showed that products were delivered, apparently in breach of the law.

Despite a bold clear label warning that it was a vape, NZ Couriers dropped a Vape Shed package off with no questions asked.

The Vape Shed had tried the hardest to check out the buyer, insisting on a driver licence scan and a scan of the Prezzy Card, and, the owner of the Vape Shed says staff there actually checked out our producer online to make sure she was over 18.

Owner Pearce Stephens said: "We are confident that our internal processes were effective. Regrettably, in this instance, the courier driver failed to adhere to the agreed protocols. We will follow up with our delivery partners to ensure these events are mitigated as much as possible."

NZ Couriers admits that the courier should not have left the parcel at the door, but says the business did not purchase the additional service ticket which verifies proof of age and which also reimburses their courier drivers for the extra time this takes.

Retailers VAPO, Shosha and Vapourium didn't need to see any ID before purchases online.

And, before NZ Post dropped a VAPO package off, no check at the address, and before that no request for ID on the site.

Also, because we’ve used a Prezzy card, the company had no idea who bought it and no guarantee of age either.

VAPO said thanks for letting them know this had slipped through. They say it is the nature of e-commerce that customers can disguise their identities when placing orders, and that:

"This is why we have focused our efforts on the delivery end of the sales process and invested in an expensive age verification solution from NZ Post, which has unfortunately let us down."

NZ Post says it is clear, following Fair Go's tests, that they have "failed to meet our security standards in these instances, and we sincerely apologise for this".

"We will be conducting further training and improving the technology to make it easier for our delivery partners to make these deliveries correctly, as well as improving our reporting to monitor compliance."

NZ Post did the right thing for the first time with one of the packages. No-one home so it wasn’t left, but our mystery shopper got a link to redeliver and back came the package, with a fresh label over the top which omitted the all-important age restricted info.

Which might explain how it was then delivered successfully - but with no ID check. And the person answering that door - and getting the parcel - was 16, too young to be receiving vapes.

The retailer was Shosha - the same retailer Patrice had spotted selling vaping product online to her then-13-year-old son, more than a year ago.

Patrice said that when she'd complained to them they'd said:

"Oh it will just be an online thing. I said well, my son's young how can he do this, what ID checks do they have, and he said no there's no ID checks online."

Shosha's response to Fair Go is: “We have identified an issue under our current system where payment by Prezzy Card does not trigger the same safeguards as if the customer had used other forms of payment.

"To ensure this does not happen again, we have introduced a new safeguard that prevents orders from being processed if the cardholder’s name is not present on the transaction."

Shosha say they're talking to delivery companies about the R18 ID checks on the doorsteps and also talking to banks about anything that can prevent purchases by under 18s.

Our final test again resulted in a drop-off by NZ Post - despite an age-restricted marking, and this comment by the courier to the 14 year-old who opened the door.

"I think it's vape."

The owner of Vapourium, which made that sale, was shocked when we let him know.

He says he's now banned Prezzy Cards as a payment method, and says he already runs software that blocks sales to sensitive addresses like schools and other places where they spot concerns.

Our question then is whether it's it just a matter of making it harder for under 18's to buy vapes, or, should we be making mistakes more costly and more likely to be found out?

Time to get political. We tagged in Maiki Sherman from 1News - to put the Minister in charge of smoking and vaping on the spot.

With online sales seeming such an easy way for youngsters to get their hands on vapes, Maiki asked Casey Costello why there hasn't been a good hard look at this. The answer?

"I've got advice.. and it's part of the programme of work.. but i haven't got anything specific as yet."

Costello is about to ask her Cabinet colleagues for the green light to bring changes to how vapes are displayed and sold and controlled, to make it more like the way tobacco is handled, but these laws are only as good as the enforcement by public health officials.

We asked if the Government was going to pump that enforcement up.

"This is where I want to look at how we're licensing and regulating that regime, and look at where that should sit. At the moment I think it's sitting with health, and I believe that there's a lot more value in it being locally controlled and locally monitored."

The Minister said, "We don't want young people vaping, categorically we don't want them to be taking it up, but we do know it's an effective tool to stop people smoking."

Patrice knows what we've been doing so far is pitiful.

"It's too big, I can't change it. I can't stop a child vaping if it's accessible. If it was harder to get, more expensive, whatever the situation, but when you're buying a 30ml for $10, or $12.95 delivered - we've got a major problem on our hands," Patrice says.

"Kids cant come up with $1200 to buy three cartons of cigarettes but they can come up with 12.95. Actually this government needs to take responsibility and shut this down so that kids don't get access to it so easily."

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Finally, the Ministry of Health told us it has not run any controlled purchase operations to test vape websites.

It has examined about a third of the 149 approved sites in the past six months, to check for advertising or product listings that break the rules, but there have been no prosecutions from any of those checks.