Short description
Customs officers in Hong Kong intercepted a shipment of 70 Nvidia Quadro K2200 video cards, estimated at $76,500, hidden inside a shipment of live lobsters weighing 280 kg. The shipment was spotted at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao post without accompanying documentation. The smugglers were likely to have been heading to mainland China, with the route through the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge proving popular among contraband carriers. Customs officials had previously prevented smugglers from transporting microSD cards in a bicycle frame, SSDs inside an electric scooter and Intel processors taped to the body and legs of individuals.
Smugglers hid 70 video cards among 280 kg of live lobsters
Hong Kong customs officers intercepted the contraband of 70 video cards hidden in a shipment of 280 kg of live lobsters.
The suspicious cargo was spotted at the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao post. According to The Register, neither the lobsters nor the video card had accompanying documentation. The authorities estimated the cargo at $76,500, although it is not clear whether it is the price of only video cards or video cards together with lobsters.
As predicted by The Register, the cargo consisted of Nvidia Quadro K2200 video cards. These are graphic processors based on the Maxwell architecture with 640 CUDA cores and 4 GB of GDDR5 memory. Quadro K2200 cards were released in mid-2014 and are roughly comparable in performance to GeForce GTX 750 Ti or Radeon HD 7850.
The batch of GPUs and lobsters were probably on their way to mainland China. The route through the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge is one of the most popular among smugglers. For example, last month customs officials prevented an attempt to transport 6,000 microSD cards in a bicycle frame across the border. In March, another smuggler tried to smuggle 84 Kingston NVMe SSDs inside the steering frame of a Yadea KS electric scooter through customs.
That same month, a man tried to smuggle 240 Intel Raptor Lake processors into China by taping them to his body and legs. Another man tried to transport 239 Intel Core i5-13400F processors in the same way. And in December 2022, an enterprising woman pretended to be pregnant and tried to cross the border with 202 Intel processors and 9 iPhones.
