“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)?
I don't really know. For example, we live near the Maine/New Hampshire line. Maine has a bottle deposit, New Hampshire doesn't. My wife marks with a magic marker any bottles we buy in New Hampshire with an "NH", those, when we're done, get thrown into regular recycling. The others go into the bottle-return bin.
If I accidently put a NH bottle in the bottle-return bin, my wife will carefully remove it, and pointedly remind me of the $5,000 (or whatever) fine.
As far as these people who were caught, I guess there was some way they figured it out.