The Arizona Department of Public Safety apparently did a great job sniffing out a fake septic service truck last week, then finding 743 pounds of marijuana in the vacuum tank.

According to news accounts from the Arizona Republic newspaper, CNN, Fox News and others, state police noticed “suspicious markings’’ on the truck labeled United Arizona LLC, and made a traffic stop. The bust happened along U.S. 19, about 35 miles south of Tucson, a known route for drug and human trafficking.

Driver Leonard Salcido, 24, of Tucson, Ariz., gave officers permission to search the truck. The pot, with an estimated street value of $409,000, was found in dozens of orange and red plastic-wrapped bales jammed into the tank through a topside manway. Salcido was arrested on suspicion of possession and transportation of marijuana.

According to a CNN story, the bales were found in a tank full of human waste.

While the white truck had the appearance of a legitimate septic service vehicle, a quick Internet search turns up no company matching the name on the truck and a reverse lookup search shows the phone number on the tank is not valid. Police said the septic truck is just the latest way drug dealers have tried to disguise their shipments.

“It just shows how desperate these drug cartels are,” law enforcement spokesman Bart Graves told CNN. “They'll go to any lengths to conceal their product. We've seen it concealed (among) watermelons, bell peppers. This is the first time we've seen it concealed in human waste.”