Tower PC case allegedly used as 'creative cavity' by drug importer

Australian police have arrested a man after alleging he imported what appear to be tower PC cases that were full of illicit drugs. The arrest of an unnamed Malaysian national took place yesterday, after a consignment of goods arrived by air in Sydney on October 16. Australia's Border Force spotted something odd in the shipment …

[Chloe Cresswell]

I wonder if they were betting the case couldn't be x-rayed. Our xray controller PCs can't, but the case is 1-1.5mm thick steel on all sides, which does tend to make your average dell look like tinfoil.

(Found out about this when taking a repaired unit back to Birmingham Airport, going airside, the controlled appeared as a solid blank square on the xray machine we had to go though to get to where our xray machine lived!)

[KittenHuffer]

It kinda makes sense that the case for the controller for something that produces x-rays would be specified to stop x-ray penetration. Otherwise the x-rays would be able to take over the controller, and then start plotting the demise of their human masters!

I for one welcome our new x-ray controlled controller controlling masters!

[Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese]

x^2-rays?

[Chloe Cresswell]

Naw, it was just a 4U short rack case. They always tend to be made out of relatively thick metal, as often the entire weight is held by the ears. the xray source itself was on the other side of the room in it's own housing with a vertical wave guide.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Some customs agencies have some pretty powerful x-ray machines at their disposal. One (might even have been ABF) recently showed x-rays of an excavator with drugs hidden inside the boom, and that steel is a lot more than 1.5 mm thick.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Oh, if you want the big stuff, look at the mobile units designed to xray an entire lorry, and it's load, whether in the drag, or in a shipping container on the back. The warning signs for how far away from the scanning section you need to be are impressive.

[John Brown (no body)]

...and maybe an interesting deterrent for illegal immigrants. Do we use these in Calais? Invasion of Mutant Immigrant Body Snatchesr?

[david 12]

The warning signs for how far away from the scanning section you need to be are impressive.

Doctor tells me that for medical x-rays, the safest place to stand is behind the radiologist.

(Apparently they are known to be x-ray-opaque.)

[sanmigueelbeer]

Every port-of-entry station has a large x-ray building. The Chinese-made x-ray machine is capable of scanning the entire length of a shipping container, including the prime mover plust a wee bit more.

[Mentat74]

He should have...

Hidden his harddrugs in a harddrive...

[Geoff Campbell]

Re: He should have...

Or a dummy battery in a laptop. Either would have sailed through customs no questions asked.

Yet another example of criminals being caught because they were simply not very good.

GJC

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: He should have...

It's the baggie shape that gives it away. Had they put the stuff in tin boxes, mounted so as to be lined up with the case, it would just look like a component. It's the falling-off-at-the-edges that look sus.

[Geoff Campbell]

Re: He should have...

Well, that and shipping £30 PC cases by air, as the article says. Sometimes things are just obviously dodgy, you know?

GJC

[Ball boy]

Vast numbers of items ship by air and yet they managed to home in on this one? That suggests they had - wait for it - Intel inside

/coat

[Howard Sway]

Should have shipped them as high value AI PCs - they would have sailed through without checks

AI = Amphetamines Inside

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it a high-spec gaming machine - ideal for speed running

[Jedit]

"ideal for speed running"

Whereas if he'd been smuggling weed it would only have been good for floating point operations.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Turbo Switch

ideal for speed running

Did these have such a switch to go into over-clock mode?

[David 132]

Brings a whole new meaning to the term “the Intel Bong”.

[Bebu]

Creative Cavity?

I was picturing a street mime requiring a cavity search.

[elsergiovolador]

Filler

Funny that some manufacturers put fillers that look like that so that the components stay in place during transport.

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Clippy on drugs

It looks like are growing another sets of heads ... do you have advice?

[Luiz Abdala]

Gaming addiction..

... is almost as expensive as drugs, depending on the Country...

...but not 1 million doses of Pervitin expensive.

A decent rig, a pc case filled with a RTX 4090, a Ryzen 9950X, a couple of NVME drives, and some 64 GB of RAM is no chump change around my neighborhood.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Importing meth?

A sad indictment on Australian chemical education

[James O'Shea]

Re: Importing meth?

Ah. I just posted something along this line. I really should read all the posts before posting.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

He shoulda used a more modern case - they have secret compartments for putting the actual components in leaving the main body of the case as some kind of windowed light show , which makes them unnecessarily difficult to work with.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Or used RGB meth

[NXM]

Did someone press the Turbo button...

... for extra speed?

[Spoobistle]

Case closed

So are the coppers going to dump the cases in the WEE'd bin?

[Anonymous Coward]

wont' see daylight for years

AU is brutal with drug crimes, know a guy that got caught up in them there 2 years ago, they gave him 9 years for possession.... Frell in the US, my state, weed is almost legal, but if you have a pipe with residue,, years..... I don't see how that helps society.

[_Elvi_]

... DUDE !!!!

Yur gettin a D3LL !!

(Sorry.. poor form for a joke like this..this fellow needs a long lockup, and some slight love with a fixed object.. Drugs like this kill people.. destroy lives )

[James O'Shea]

_Importing_ meth? Why?

It's easy to make the stuff using legal or semi-legal starter chemicals. Has no-one in Oz ever seen Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul? Or at least taken O level chemistry? Damn it, they're supposed to have lots of criminal ancestors. Ned Kelly must be very disappointed.

And if you must import it, it is so easy to rig things so that your stuff is hard to detect. M'man wanted a nice government-paid vacation, it's the only explanation which makes sense.

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Re: _Importing_ meth? Why?

< "M'man wanted a nice government-paid vacation, it's the only explanation which makes sense."

Nonsense. Plain, garden-variety stupidity makes more sense than intentional self incarceration. Most meth heads aren't science teachers like Walt.

[Neil Barnes]

100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

I'm probably not down with the kids, but they're buying meth on the street in hundred gram lots? Seems excessive...

[Yankee Doodle Doofus]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

Your math seems flawed. 100 kilos divided by one million is only one tenth of one gram, which also seems like an odd amount for a street deal. What would the price on that be? Around the same as a bottle of soda maybe? You'd probably get more of a rush from the caffeine in the soda...

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

Web says "The typical dose of methamphetamine is a 'point' (0.1 grams) of base or ice".

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

Wikipedia suggests that 100 mg is several times the standard therapeutic dose for methamphetamine, but I don't have the first clue what a recreational dose is for habituated users.

However bear in mind that the police tend to simplify things when they give estimates like this when publicising drug seizures.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

I thought it was only US police that spread out individual cookies to make a shoplifiting arrest look like a major drug haul

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

>but I don't have the first clue what a recreational dose is for habituated users.

I understand it's very more-ish, like me with chocolate hobnobs

[Neil Barnes]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

My maths is indeed flawed; thanks for pointing it out. You'd think by my advanced age I'd have been able to keep track of the zeros :)

[Boo Radley]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

The current street price around South Texas is $25 or so for 3.5 grams, called an 8 ball, because it's 1/8 of an ounce. 20 years ago the price was $300 for the same amount. I don't know what kind of maths the police use to calculate a drug bust's street value but it always seems like they're an order of magnitude off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 100 kilograms of methamphetamine – enough for around one million street deals.

100kg = 100,000 g = 100,000,000 mg… so a million 100mg portions, no?

[Winkypop]

Kids

Just say NaN

[Blackjack]

Honesty just legalise soft drugs, with those being legal the hard ones will sell a lot less, the government will have to waste less money and have a new source of revenue by taxing marijuana or something.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But then you'd have to spend all the tax money bailing out tobacco and alcohol companies

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

That's heavy, Doc.

Forget the x-rays or the shipping method. I've lugged some old PC cases up to about 20 kg. I've never ever met a 100 kg PC tower. Heck, 100 kg is approximately 5/6 of ME (~ 120 kg)! The sheer weight/mass alone should have tipped off any of the proper authorities!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: That's heavy, Doc.

From the x-ray image and the photo of the opened case, I suspect that was NOT 100Kg in a single PC case unless that was some especially dense drugs.