Chip shortage reveals $123,000 CPU smuggling attempt in Hong Kong

Another smuggling attempt exceeds $4 million

It was recently reported by HKEPC that the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge Customs Department reported that it recently stopped two smuggling attempts involving processors Intel 10th generation Comet Lake. The sum of the values of all CPUs that tried to take from one country to another illegally totaled a value greater than $123,000, a high number for the unsuccessful attempts of the bad guys, but that would yield a much bigger profit due to the shortage of processors in the region, due to the lack of chips for the production of hardware.

But these were not isolated events involving computer hardware. On July 5th, Hong Kong Customs carried out a seizure of over 1,000 RAM memories, 630 smartphones, 2,200 CPUs and also items that escape the world of technology, such as 70 cosmetic products. The value in this action was well above the one mentioned initially, this smuggling attempt exceeds 4 million dollars.

The first case of smuggling with CPUs occurred on June 16, on this day Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge customs officials stopped a truck driver from Guangdong and Macao for inspection and to the surprise of officials 256 CPUs were found strapped to the driver’s upper calves and ribs. And they weren’t entry-level or intermediate models, the models that were next to the driver’s body were Intel Core i7-10700 and Intel Core i9-10900K, which together were valued at around 800,000 Chinese Yuan, which corresponds to roughly US$123,281.

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The second case of CPU smuggling happened on June 26 on the same bridge, during an inspection by a Hong Kong customs official, was found in a passenger truck about 52 Intel processors which were hidden between the driver and front passenger seats. In this seizure, the estimated value of the items was not revealed.

The current shortage of chips from several companies is causing many items such as GPUs and CPUs to have an inflated value in the world market due to the lack of stock, while there is no normalization in manufacturing and stability in the supply of these items, more cases like these will continue to emerge.