Woman tried to enter the China with over 200 Intel processors hidden in her belly pretending to be pregnant.
Have you ever heard of processor smuggling? Yet. Chinese customs arrested a woman which was returning to her country with 202 Intel processors and nine iPhone wrapped around her belly pretending to be pregnant.
The would-be smuggler was a young woman crossing the border between Macau, an independent regions, and Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong province near Hong Kong. He was passing through customs at Gongbei Port when an official noticed that he was behaving strangely.
The woman was passing through customs wearing a baggy brown dress when an employee noticed that her posture was unusual for a heavily pregnant woman.
They separated her from the world and asked her about her pregnancy. She told them she was 5-6 months pregnant even though she looked like she was close to 9 months. They searched her and discovered the prosthetic belly and product storage underneath.
She had wrapped 202 CPUs and nine iPhones in cling film and tied them above her stomach using tape. In one photo of the products shared on social media, the processors can be identified as Intel models based on the LGA 1700 package, so either Alder Lake or Rocket Lake.
The iPhones look like black models of the iPhone X or XS. If all CPUs are high-end, the total value could be close to 100.000,00 euros.
Smuggling is common at the Chinese border thanks to high import taxes. Several would-be smugglers have tried in the past to cross the border with CPUs and phones strapped to their bodies.
In March, a man with 160 CPUs and 16 flip phones was arrested at the port of Gongpei. The record for the most smuggled CPUs is currently held by a pair of truck drivers who returned from Hong Kong with 256 processors hidden. The corresponding record for phones is 146 iPhones, also by a man from Hong Kong.
