Chinese authorities arrested a man in China who had 160 Intel CPUs taped onto his body in an attempt to smuggle them into the country.
As per a post by Chinese Customs officials on Weibo, on March 9th their team arrested a man at the airport after noticing a weird walking behavior suggesting the man trying to hide something on his body. After the arrest, the team discovered that the man had taped high-end CPUs and mobile phones on his waist, abdomen, and calves.
The smuggler had duct-taped 160 high-end 11th and 12th generation Intel CPUs, on his body along with 16 foldable Samsung Galaxy smartphones. While the post didn’t mention the exact models of the CPUs and smartphones recovered, it is believed that the person was trying to smuggle products worth more than $100K illegally into China.
This crime is the latest in the ever-growing syndicate of attempting to smuggle high-end hardware into China without the notice of the Customs Office. Just last year, the Customs Officials had arrested a man trying to smuggle 256 Intel CPUs in a similar fashion. The smuggling of high-end gaming hardware has increased drastically since the supply of high-end hardware is extremely short and they are extremely useful for mining rigs.
Due to worldwide shortages and high demand, the high-end hardware is selling at a steep premium over the MSRP. In the case of GPUs, some places are selling GPUs at more than twice the MSRP, while the CPUs are also going at a premium of upto 50% over MSRP.
In the past year, the supply shortages have improved very slowly and the demand hasn’t died down. The industry leaders and analysts believe that the supply won’t be improving before 2023. As a result of these shortages, smuggling attempts aren’t likely to stop anytime soon.
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