High Tech Drug Smugglers Now Use Drones

The lower Niagara River (below/north of Niagara Falls and the Rapids) has been a favored location for trade and smuggling for centuries. It seems to have taken a new turn recently, per this story, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/01/17/drones-carry-mdma-into-america-via-niagara-falls/?sh=7b39ea602c83 also covered by BuffaloNews.com and other outlets.

The neighbors thought it odd that no one seemed to live in the capacious, quintessential American family house in Lewiston, New York, a small town that sits on the Niagara River, just east of Ontario, Canada. Whoever owned the $650,000 property appeared neither to reside there nor care about upkeep, its lawn unmowed to the point of being "unmanageable," locals later told police. Even odder, they told the cops, were the monthly arrivals of individuals driving expensive-looking cars, only for the visitors to leave a few days later.

Then in the early hours of September 21 last year, the house became the subject of a police raid, according to a recently unsealed search warrant obtained by Forbes. In the middle of the night, using a surveillance tool that could "recognize drone signatures, map their flight path and identify starting and stopping points via GPS," border patrol watched an unmanned aerial vehicle flying over the Niagara River and into the house's garden, according to the warrant. When the cops arrived, the pilot and two other individuals tried to flee, but were caught and taken in for questioning. The police found that attached to the drone was a package of MDMA with an approximate street value of $110,000. A subsequent search of the house recovered multiple webcams watching over entrances and exits, a number of commercial drones and paracord, a kind of rope originally designed for parachutes.

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