Smugglers busted sneaking tech into China International Talk Like a Pirate Day is still months away – circle September 19 on your calendar, me hearties! – but The Register has found news of technology smuggling in China that suggests a buccaneering approach to imports. One incident, reported by Chinese media outlet MyDrivers, saw Chinese customs authorities notice a …
To hide them inside the body of a car or other large metallic object? A person is always going to be looked at more closely than one car amongst hundreds packed into shipping containers.
Or for that matter put in a false wall on the back end of the shipping container, and weld the contraband inside. Who is going to notice if the inside dimensions are 6" shorter than normal? The "main" container might contain anything from high value electronics to grain, whatever legit imports cause customs inspectors to be the least curious about the possibility there is more than meets the eye.
I dunno man. There are a lot of opportunities for a container to be checked and scrutinised. They can be at sea for a long time and pass through a lot of ports. Shipping via sea is not usually end to end.
You'd probably have to piggy back off some sort of commercial shipment. Anything labelled as "personal" will likely increase the odds of a check.
Someone I know sent a container from South Africa to the UK and it happened to be 3 bottles of wine over the declaration of 12 bottles and that was quickly discovered.
Obviously I have no idea what the smugglers that don't get caught do
Sit in their Cornish cottages getting smashed on French brandy and rum while their wives/sisters/girlfriends try on their new silk clothes?
My wife had a lot of Cornish fishermen in her ancestry..
A false wall in a container is a common trick, and would work well for a thin, high value items like CPUs. The internal dimensions only have to change by a small amount. Customs don't have the time or resources to minutely, physically check every single consignment, they work from tipoffs. I was once the first car off a ferry into Dover and was immediately pulled over for inspection. They didn't ask much in the way of questions, as to who we were or where we were going. They were completely focussed on thoroughly searching just one side of the boot space, nowhere else. A bag of dirty laundry gave them no joy, and they reluctantly moved on. Seemed like the they clearly knew exactly what they were looking for.
That was the second time, first time was a bunch of students returning from a booze cruise, in a flamed Ford Cortina, with the rear bumper almost scraping on the ground because of the amount of beer in the boot - no prior tipoff required. We thought we had carefully calculated our exact allowance of 8.25 cases per person. But they insisted on counting every single bottle and there was a small overage. The customs officers were amused, and indulgent enough to let us neck the extra 6 bottles before we could proceed.
There was a story at my uni about a group of three students that went on a booze cruise to Calais. They were going to get enough cheap booze to last them the first term, spending a chunk of their grants in the process. Everything was fine when they set off across the Channel in the van on a ferry via vouchers from a tabloid newspaper. Grant cheques hadn’t cleared though before they left so they didn’t have a massive amount of money between them.
Still they went with the small amount of cash they had and shopped in the French hypermarket. Then the French went on strike, not sure who is was exactly, my memory ain’t what it was but the ports were shut. They were stuck there but had some booze and it was warm so decided to make the most of being in France. They had a party with other stranded brits and drank all the booze they’d bought. Not a great start to their academic life but could have been worse.
Arrived back in the UK when the ferries resumed to the welcoming embrace of UK Customs. They took a very keen interest in three lads who had come back from France after two days with a very empty Ford Transit van. Customs searched everywhere, looking behind panels, under the chassis in ducts etc. because the officers didn’t believe their story that they’d drunk it all, given how much people normally bought/brought back.
From TFA: (referring to a different foiled attempt at smuggling tech goods) "Upon inspection, the batch of suspected smuggled electronic products and electronic parts were found concealed behind a batch of properly declared goods inside the container," Hong Kong authorities stated.
So yes, shipping containers (aka "Connex boxes") are checked. The port/border authorities probably have thermal scanners and such, and a hidden compartment, even with inert goods, will show up as an "additional" compartment due to the "extra" wall having different thermal characteristics than the main compartment.
I just bought 4 cpus from vendor in China, the 12/24 core units, cost me $36 apiece (completely obsolete 22nm devices). They were delivered via postal service and didn’t even trigger customs charges, Same with my $95 Tesla P4s I received last week. If I were to guess “why,” I’m pretty sure customs are amused by my toy supercomputer installation :)
I've got junk PCs that age that I save to scrap gold from rather than trash them - nobody wants used computers near me,,,
I would rather give them to the poor in china, or any place, than trash them. To bad so many government leaders are dicks that like to keep people poor.
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