Image credit – Hong Kong Customs & Excise
People smuggle all sorts of things these days for various reasons. Maybe import taxes are too high, or maybe it’s illegal to sell it officially, but whatever the case, we’ve seen some pretty creative ways smugglers have gone about trying to hide their stash from being discovered by the authorities.
Over in Hong Kong, one smuggler tried (and failed) to conceal the fact that he was smuggling out CPUs and how he did that was by strapping them to his body, as you can see in the photo above. However, the photo only shows a fraction of the number of CPUs he tried to smuggle, which apparently numbered at 256.
According to the authorities, the CPUs he tried to smuggle were Intel i7-10700 and i9-10900Ks. It seems that chip smuggling is a thing between Mainland China and Hong Kong. This is partly due to the current chip shortage in which everyone wants chips but not everyone can buy them, so smuggling in units will allow them to be resold at marked up prices and fetch a tidy profit.
It seems that things are getting pretty bad to the point where a report from the South China Morning Post has revealed that a man was robbed and assaulted of chips worth about $644,000.