It's not commerce. It's reclaimng the deposit you paid in the first place. The can isn't necessarily worth 5c, that's just the deposit you put on it.
If you put a deposit down on an item, say to buy. or if you are renting something, you must go back to the place you rented it from in order to reclaim your deposit. You can't return a U-Haul to a Ryder place and demand your deposit back, even if Ryder rents exactly the same kind of truck.
“It’s not commerce. It’s reclaimng the deposit you paid in the first place.”
OK. I get the fraud now. Nobody paid a deposit on those cans.
My next question is how do you know that they weren’t originally bought from California and taken to Arizona? Further, are the cans and bottle marked that their was a deposit? Shouldn’t California have ‘marked’ those that required a ‘deposit’ so that people could identify them? If they are marked as ‘deposit’ how do you know they weren’t from California? If they weren’t marked, and should have been, why did California pay deposit money for them? Are cans sold in Arizona really from California and marked by California law as ‘deposit’ cans, but no deposit is collected before exported (why would this be fraud—it’s just confusing)?