Customs officers caught a Chinese woman red-handed while trying to smuggle over 200 computer processors and nine iPhones across the border.
Her alleged pregnancy was actually worth about $50,000 in merchandise.
The young woman was crossing the border from the independent territory of Macau to Zhuhai, a city in Guangdong province near Hong Kong.
While passing through customs at Gongbei Port, an officer spotted the young woman acting strangely. She was wearing a brown maternity dress and an officer noticed her posture wasn’t depicting someone pregnant, seemingly in her third trimester.
She was separated from the rest of the queue, and when asked about her pregnancy, she said that she was 5-6 months pregnant despite her posture, looking like someone who was almost due.
The officers searched her and discovered that she had a prosthetic belly with a stash of hardware beneath it.
Within the prosthetic belly, she wrapped with cling film, were found nine iPhones and 202 Central Processing Units (CPUs), which she had bound to her abdomen using tape.
In the rare pictures shared on social media, netizens identified the CPUs as Intel models based on the LGA 1700 package, while the iPhones resembled black models of either iPhone Xs or X.
Smuggling goods isn’t new along the Chinese border, thanks to their high import taxes, making it hard to bring such items into the country. Even before this incident, several people have tried crossing the border with phones and CPUs strapped on their bodies, and more often than not, they have been caught.
In March 2022, for example, a man carrying 16 foldable phones and 160 CPUs was arrested at the Port of Gongbei. However, the record is held by a pair of truck drivers who tried to smuggle 256 processors strapped to their limbs.
The appeal of high-end phones like iPhone has led to a high demand for such products, especially for low-income consumers who can’t afford to buy the devices off the shelves.
