Officials on China’s border with Hong Kong caught a smuggler with 96 iPhones strapped to his body like a hi-tech suit of armour.
Chinese customs officers at the Futian border crossing pulled a young man aside when they noticed that his “gait was weird, with still joints and tense muscles, as if he was carrying a heavy load,” the state-run newspaper People’s Daily reported on Monday. He wore a red athletic shirt and black athletic trousers, and carried two plastic shopping bags.
Although the officials didn’t find anything suspicious in the man’s luggage, they made him walk through a metal detector, which produced an alarm. They discovered the iPhone 5, 5S, 6 and 6 Plus models wrapped in clear plastic and taped to his chest, abdomen, thighs and calves. The newspaper estimated the devices’ total cost at £32,000. They weighed at least 12kg.
While Apple’s iPhone is manufactured in China, Beijing’s taxation policies make the device more expensive on the mainland than in Hong Kong and the west. A 16GB iPhone 6 sells in Beijing for £571; in Hong Kong, it sells for for £477.
Customs officials said the man was from Hong Kong and that he was a “typical smuggler” with a record of past offences, according to the People’s Daily. The maximum penalty in Hong Kong for exporting items without properly declaring them is a £1.3m fine and seven years in prison.
In the past month, customs officials in two main Hong Kong-China border crossings uncovered 18 cases of smugglers strapping items to their bodies, the newspaper reported. They confiscated 282 iPhones, 4,088 SD cards, 840 USB thumb drives and hundreds of CPU chips.