Chinese border guards detained a Hong Kong resident when they noticed he was moving a little strange. The reason why he looked suspicious as he walked is because he strapped 94 iPhones to his body in hopes of smuggling them across the border.
Although the officials didn't find anything suspicious in the man’s luggage, they then made him walk through a metal detector, which produced a “resounding” 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 a 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 discovered that the man was from Hong Kong, and that he was a “typical smuggler” with a record of past offences. 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, it was reported. They confiscated 282 iPhones, 4,088 SD cards, 840 USB thumb drives, and hundreds of CPU chips.
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