PC hardware can be an expensive and rare commodity. The last few years have shown this more impressively than ever before. No wonder, then, that it can also be a coveted commodity as smuggled goods.
In the case of the nameless smuggler we are talking about here, we are talking about one of the few components that has been relatively cheap for a long time. More precisely from SSDs. But if 84 of them are to be smuggled, the sums are quite substantial.
Said smuggler has it loud Videocardz.com managed to fit all this hardware into a single e-scooter. More precisely in a single part of the electric scooter. But one after anonther.
84 NVMe SSDs discovered by X-ray
Kingston’s 84 NVMe SSDs. (Image: Chinese Customs)
When Chinese officials X-rayed an e-scooter at the Qingmao checkpoint in Guangdong-Macau on the Hong Kong border, they discovered 84 SSDs in the handlebars.
These were NVMe SSDs in M.2 format from the manufacturer, which, in addition to their high transfer rate, also have the advantage that they are relatively small. Apparently small enough to fit dozens of them into a single e-scooter part.
The smuggler hid the SSDs in the handlebars of an e-scooter. (Image: Chinese Customs)
The smuggler allegedly made himself suspicious by wanting to bring the scooter through the “non-declaration channel”. What happened to the man is not known. However, it’s safe to assume he’s been arrested and is now in trouble.
A short example for the price classification: Samsung’s popular SSD 980 already costs around 50 dollars with 500 gigabytes. If we’re talking about cheap Kingston models like the NV2 SSD with 2,000 GB, it’s 100 dollars. So the SSDs could easily have been worth a few thousand dollars.
There have been reports of such incidents in recent months. For example about a woman who hid 202 CPUs and 9 iPhones in a fake bellyor about a man with 160 CPUs and 16 smartphones on his body wanted to march through customs. An e-scooter as a hiding place has not yet been included.
Have you stumbled across other curious smuggling cases in the past? Can you think of particularly creative places to hide what is currently by far the most expensive gaming hardware in the form of graphics cards – purely hypothetically, of course? And do you also like to read such strange stories at GameStar Tech? Let us know in the comments.
