Intel Inside — Smuggler tried to hide over 200 CPUs in fake belly

3 years ago 1

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Chinese customs authorities recently caught a woman trying to smuggle over 200 Intel chips and several iPhones in a prosthetic belly attached to her body, Mydrivers reports.

The woman was apprehended at the Gongbei Port in Zhuhai while attempting to return to mainland China from Macau with the cargo.

She claimed that she was five to six months pregnant, but officials believed her belly was too big for the alleged gestation period and found it suspicious that she could walk effortlessly.

Upon inspection, the customs officials found she had duct-taped 202 Intel Alder Lake processors and nine Apple iPhones, which appear to be from the iPhone X series, to the inside of a fake silicone belly.

IT hardware news site TKEPC shared pictures of the discovery on Twitter, including the image below showing the fake belly suspended beneath the woman’s dress.

Even if the customs agents had missed the signs, Tom’s Hardware pointed out it was unlikely the woman would have passed through an X-ray scanner or metal detector without being flagged.

The publication said this incident followed several others in which smugglers had tried to circumvent Chinese customs with large loads of processors.

In March 2022, a man was busted trying to sneak past customs with 160 Intel CPUs and 16 foldable smartphones strapped to his body.

Last year, another man was caught using the same technique to try and smuggle 256 Intel chips over the border.

The CPUs were supposedly destined for China’s growing underground chip market, created by the severe semiconductor shortages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tom’s Hardware has hypothesised the preference for smuggling Intel over AMD could be due to the latter’s AMD4 socket CPUs using a Pin Grid Array design, making them more likely to be damaged during transportation.

But AMD’s most recent chips — the Ryzen 7000 series — have also adopted the Land Grid Array form factor used by Intel, which means attempts to smuggle these processors could be around the corner.