Bulgarian customs seized 39.4m illegal cigarettes in October, the most in a single month in the past 10 years, the Customs Agency said. That is 41% of everything seized in the first 10 months of 2026.

From January to October, customs officers seized 96.1m cigarettes. That is 45.3m, or 89.3%, more than in all of 2025. The agency says Bulgaria is a transit country for smuggling to Central and Western Europe.

There were six seizures in October, most of them near the Kulata border crossing, and each involved millions of cigarettes. The haul also included 7.8m blanks for packs of well-known brands, rolling paper, parts for cigarette-making machines and more than 650,000 filters. The agency says they were bound for Western Europe, probably for illegal production.

At Bulgaria's external borders, officers seized 37.4m cigarettes, or 38.9% of the total, mostly on the border with Turkey. At border crossings, they found 26.6m, or 27.6% of the total from January to October.

Seizures at internal borders rose more than 10 times, mostly at Kulata and in the Vidin area, where checks have been tightened.

Operation Prometheus targeted the smuggling of excise goods through border crossings. The agency presented its results on 8 October. Staff from the customs intelligence and investigation directorates, the anti-drug trafficking directorate and the X-ray systems directorate took part. Officers stopped four lorries carrying cigarettes: two at the Lesovo checkpoint and two at Kulata.

In about 24 hours, they seized nearly 25m cigarettes worth an estimated €5m. At a briefing, deputy director Stefan Bakalov said the amounts were unprecedented in Bulgaria for an operation of that length.

The agency credits the results to customs checks, including extra checks near the Schengen border crossings. The organisation and coordination of the teams, risk analysis and work on these checks, linked to Bulgaria's entry into Schengen, "led to record results in cigarette seizures", director Nikolay Shushkov said.

The number of cigarettes with Bulgarian excise stamps that smugglers tried to take to Western and Central Europe is also rising. From January to October 2026, it was 3.2m, against 1.6m in all of 2025.