Chinese Customs Bust Smuggler With 420 SSDs Strapped to His Body
upstart writes:
Facepalm: When will people who smuggle hardware into China learn that strapping thousands of dollars of components to your body often leads to arrest? Once again, the country's customs have caught someone trying the same old trick. On this occasion, a trafficker had 420 M.2 SSDs attached to his torso using tape.
[...] The 420 M.2 SSDs are said to be worth around HK$258,000 or $32,984.94. That works out to an average of $78.53 each, so they're likely on the higher end of the quality scale.
[...] Smugglers have been trying imaginative ways of sneaking tech goods into China for years. In 2015, a man was caught with an impressive 146 iPhones strapped to his body. A woman attempted the same thing a few years later, reducing the number of iPhones to 102.
Taping CPUs to one's body is also popular. A pair of men tried to smuggle 256 Intel Core i7-10700 and Core i9-10900K processors, then worth $123,000, by attaching them to their calves and torsos at the height of the chip shortage in 2021. Another man did the same thing a year later, wrapping 160 CPUs and 16 folding phones to his body, and it was only in March when someone tried this with 239 CPUs.
Not everyone goes for the taping method. A woman in 2022 tried to enter China with over 200 Intel CPUs hidden in a fake pregnant belly, and a man this year tried to sneak 84 SSDs past Chinese customs by stuffing them inside an electric scooter. Some people are just lazy and simply lie about what's inside the crates they are transporting, like the man who tried to smuggle HK$30 million (about $3.8 million) of electronics through Man Kam To Control Point from Hong Kong into mainland China a few months ago.
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