Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Worst Way to Smuggle CPUs…”.
I think the first one has got to be the CPU smuggling Story. The the the pictures are just wild here, all right uh. This was so Random. I was I was. I jumped on little Forum uh to check out the tech News section, as I do sometimes to see if we can find anything more for when – and I came across this posted by big streams.
Thanks Big streunes tries to enter China with over over 200 Intel Alder Lake CPUs hidden inside fake pregnant belly. This wasn’t like a couple. That’S so many okay. These are Alder Lake CPUs. So these are high-end chips. We are talking somewhere in the neighborhood of hold on a second calculator uh 200 times, let’s say they’re, not even top tier chips like maybe like 400 bucks, or something like that. We’Re talking like with the iPhones nearly a hundred grand worth of merchandise under this. Under this fake baby bump and apparently the way that they caught her was that she claimed to be five months pregnant.
But someone well informed. Yeah obviously had neither uh ever actually been pregnant, nor ever seen a five months pregnant person, because her belly was absolutely huge and she was apparently walking effortlessly, which caused a lot of Suspicion. Interesting okay, so after careful inspection, the Customs agents discovered she had used. Duct tape to fix and hide smuggled Goods beneath the fake silicone, silicone belly, so 202 Alder Lake CPUs and nine iPhones um, not a baby uh. The original Source here wait where’s the uh. This is about 3DS at least one of the sources.
So we’ve got that the next paragraph goes in to say the strangeness about this situation. Aside from the obvious is that Customs would have eventually noticed the components and phones once Zao walked through a metal detector. Do they have pregnant women, walk through metal detectors, yeah, okay, yeah, so like what the heck yeah there’s nothing about a metal detector that would cause your your baby is metallic yeah exactly right, how could she have possibly thought this was going to work um? I think that another really kind of key part of this conversation is what is the deal with sneaking CPUs into China? There are okay. Well, there are a couple. There are a couple of answers here: um. Let’S talk about the more traditional reason to to to smuggle Electronics into a country uh.
One of the things that I heard through the grapevine allegedly allegedly was that the online site, which I don’t believe, exists anymore or if it does it’s under completely new management, like none of the people who would have been involved in this scheme, would still be there. Anyway, okay um, but allegedly Tiger Direct okay E Taylor that you guys probably remember from the days of of zip Zoom fly M wave all right back in the day. I’M talking about okay, the the big four, where Newegg Tiger Direct, zip Zoom fly and M wave. Like back in the early to mid 2000s and allegedly Tiger Direct one of the ways that they were so successful was through taking taking advantage of uh Intel’s MDF programs to a degree that just no one seemed to be able to figure out or care why they Were doing so well, okay, so they were based in Florida as far as anyone outside could tell they weren’t really selling that much online Newegg was based in California and as far as anyone could tell was selling a lot online, but Tiger Direct always seemed to sell A lot of Intel CPUs and what was really on usual so said the the word Through the Grapevine. What was really unusual about it was that it was a really different, skew mix from all the other major online sellers, because, typically especially back then high-end would sell. Really well online, like at NCIX.
Our best selling cards were like your 70 series. 80 series cards like for on the Nvidia side, like your high-end gpus, whereas someone like I remember talking to my Zotac, wrap my Zotac rep way back in the day and uh. He was saying you know: oh yeah, you guys are like the biggest seller of of high-end cards for us in the country and I’m sitting here going. We sell almost nothing.
How do you even have a job and he was like? Oh well, we sell a ton of like tier cards, but it’s all through like like Best Buy or whatever else, and that’s that’s pretty typical. That’S why, when you walk into a retail store, they don’t have like six thousand dollar AVR, like receivers on the Shelf yeah, because the just the density of customers who are going to buy that sort of thing is not high enough. They’Re not just walking into a store for that. It goes through installers like like vars, value-added resellers.
All right goes through online, like online boutiques, where, if yeah, if you’re able to cover like half of a freaking country you could manage to, you, could afford to keep three or four of those in stock. You know what I mean you can’t just put them at 250 locations, yeah and but just one. Each you’re gon na have at least two or it’s not really in stock. Is it so? It was typical for online sellers to sell a lot of Enthusiast tier hardware and for retail sellers to sell a lot of low end now, TigerDirect had retail stores, but so much of their sales.
It’S like celerons pentiums, like low end stuff, and what I heard was that the reason for that is that anytime they needed to hit an MDF Target or uh. You know pump up their their their volumes through Intel so that they could get uh marketing funding. Is they were buying like literal containers of CPUs, and then they were going on to container ships down to Brazil, okay, so a bit of a different operation but same idea, different operation, same idea, and the reason for that is that Brazil has absolutely like.
I don’t know how to say this without using cuss words, just crazy, important, just unbelievable import terrorists on electronics, yeah. If you see a Brazilian like an actual Brazilian who lives and works in Brazil holding an iPhone, they are a baller because everything all Electronics just have these wild import tariffs. And it’s so it’s so frustrating because you look at it and you go.
Why yeah like okay, sure you want revenue for your like government or whatever like, but maybe how about something more reasonable and then people could actually afford any of this stuff and import volumes would go up and, like probably it’s a net gain all around, and then You have better technology in the country and that’s good for entrepreneurs like there’s, there’s obvious reasons for, for you know, uh less friction when it comes to International Trade, particularly around Electronics, but I I don’t know anyway. The point is the the smuggling uh operation. That allegedly, was taking place out of Florida was at least understandable, because if you could get those CPUs into the country, even though you were going to have to find people who were gon na, like you know, buy them like cash price under the table or whatever Else, the difference in cost between a smuggled one and an officially imported one. It’S like double or something like that.
A prime is saying that it’s apparently been to promote uh in-country manufacturing yeah, but that’s not going to happen it as far as my understanding goes. It didn’t really work. I mean they’ve been at this for how long now it’s not happening. Yeah Intel ain’t, putting a Fab in Brazil.
It’S not! I remember really old, like I watched this really old school, like mini dock, on smuggling Xboxes into Brazil like original ones like this is. This is a this is an old topic: um yeah, not a new thing anyway, but so someone someone brought up that this is maybe to get around um some of the Trump introduced. Well, there’s no single, there’s no single American Administration to blame for this, but at this point yeah, but there are significance there, uh export restrictions, yeah on electronics into China yeah, and so, if you simply whether it’s a high import tariff that drives up pricing or whether It’S a shortage. That means you simply can’t get them.
I mean we’ve seen around the world, never mind just in Brazil or just in China, we’ve seen around the world what people are willing to pay to get their gaming fix. If there’s a shortage of something like say, for example, gpus, so this this eighty thousand dollars worth of CPUs, I don’t know about the iPhones that one I can’t really figure out Apple sells in in China um. I I don’t know, there’s other stuff, that I really don’t get like. It always kind of blows my mind when people will travel to Vancouver and like go shopping, downtown at like Fendi or Gucci or whatever I’m sitting here. But you don’t have Gucci where you’re from like uh, maybe I’m totally off base here. Maybe it’s just like uh, like a like a mindset thing when you’re traveling you’re just like yeah. I already spent four thousand dollars to be here. So, what’s another two grand on a bag like I I don’t know, I don’t understand the rationale, but apparently apple is now assembling the iPhone 13 in Brazil, but not the iPhone 13 Mini okay.
So they they won one. They. You know one one. They got one how’s that how’s the rest of it going just just ridiculous, sweet uh but yeah.
I I just thought that was funny yeah, so so we’ve so we’ve seen what people will pay when there’s a shortage. So it’s possible that this eighty thousand dollars worth of CPUs is worth. I don’t know: 100. 000.
150. 000. I mean clearly there was money to be made if she was gon na risk. I mean jail time, making an attempt like this foreign.
Can I help you? Sorry, I I got it we’re fine um yeah, no, it’s um, and this has got to be like pretty much guaranteed jail right, trying to smuggle over 100 Grand worth of something into a country yeah. I would, I would think so the amount of money involved, I’m pretty sure, they’ll throw you into jail here. I yeah. That’S that’s a lot of money.
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