The city gleaned the names and addresses from a Virginia lawsuit against one site, Cigs4cheap.com, which offered reduced-tax cigarettes and is now out of business.

...The letters, sent to those who bought cigarettes online between July 2002 and April 2004, give the alleged violators 30 days to pay or face interest and penalties of up to $200 a carton. By Friday morning, the department had received several phone calls asking to set up payment plans.

If you think you can ignore the letter, think again:

I think we'll get it all," said Finance Department spokeswoman Joanna Perlman. "We're very good at collections. We have lots of tools we can use, including liens on people's bank accounts and houses."

A New York lawyer says the letter is nasty. He bought a few cartons as a gift two years ago and was just ordered to fork over $30 in tax.

"Usually those official letters are quite polite, but this one is oddly belligerent," said Reiser, a Manhattan lawyer. "It's several pages long. It talks about vendors' false claims, and if you don't pay, we're going to get a judgment against you, and you won't be able to get a credit card."

If you think you're safe because your online vendor is still in business, you're wrong. There's an old, old law called the Jenkins Act.

It requires dealers who ship cigarettes to another state to inform that state's government of who had purchased them.

Before you respond with "Good, maybe it will make people quit smoking," think of the implications if this were expanded into a sales tax on other products sold on the Internet. It's a dangerous precedent.