Chinese customs officials arrested a woman who was trying to smuggle 200 Intel CPUs and 9 iPhones into the country.
In a bizarre twist of events, a Chinese woman was caught earlier this week trying to smuggle nearly 200 Intel CPUs using a fake pregnant belly. The woman had wrapped the items around her torso and covered them with a fake pregnant belly in an attempt to avoid detection. The incident highlights both the lengths people will go to to smuggle illegal items and the creativity of smugglers.
The would-be smuggler was a young woman traveling between Macau, an independent territory, and Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong near Hong Kong. She was noticed by a customs officer due to her strange behavior at the Gongbei port.
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The clerk immediately noticed that something was wrong with the woman in the brown maternity dress – she didn’t have the typical posture of a third-trimester pregnant woman. After separating her from the rest of the crowd, they discovered that she was only 5 or 6 months pregnant, although she looked close to her due date. After they fiddled with her, they found not only a prosthetic belly but also a hidden hardware with an Intel CPU and an iPhone underneath it all.
She glued 202 Intel CPUs and 9 iPhones to her stomach, first wrapping them in cling film. Based on the photo she posted online, it appears that the CPUs are Intel Alder Lake or Rocket Lake models based on their LGA 1700 packaging . The iPhones appear to be black X or XS models. If all the Intel CPUs are high-end, they could cost around $100,000 in total.
Smuggling is rampant at the Chinese border due to high taxes on imports. In the past, would-be smugglers have attempted to cross the border with CPUs and phones strapped to their bodies.
A man was caught trying to smuggle 160 processors and 16 foldable phones through the port of Gongpei in March. The current record for most CPUs smuggled is held by a pair of truck drivers who, upon returning from Hong Kong, had 256 processors tied together at their ends. The record for most smuggled mobile phones is also 146 iPhones —also brought from Hong Kong by a single man.
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An underground semiconductor market has been growing in China since 2020, when a global chip shortage began disrupting supplies for everything from Intel CPUs to vehicles. The U.S. to impose sweeping restrictions on exports of high-quality semiconductors and chip-making equipment to China, in part to prevent their use for military purposes, has further disrupted the market.
To deter potential smugglers, Gongpei Port could install metal detectors. But so far, the only smugglers caught have been carrying either Intel CPUs or phones. If you want to get in on the action, consider smuggling some AMD Ryzen or DDR5 CPUs by sticking them in your stomach and trying your luck.
Source: techspot.com
