So the Chi-coms can detect smuggled gold but not fentanyl?
Do not do this at home...................
Sounds like a 3 Stooges episode
PAging Mr. Auric Goldfinger. PAging Mr. Goldfinger. Please pick up the courtesy phone at the reservation desk Mr. Goldfinger
Clever. But bad practices. They didn’t take in to account shrink.
Goldfinger moved his gold by making his car’s body panels from it. Similar concept here.
There was also that movie “The Lavender Hill Mob,” where stoldn gold was melted and cast into Eiffel Tower souvenirs.
I had this basic idea many years ago, but never got in the situation that I put it to use.
I’m really surprised that Customs (even Chinese Customs) discovered it, Maybe they noticed the weight, but more likely, I’d bet, someone informed on them.
They should have installed them in the full machine having gone to the trouble of duplicating actual machine parts, rather than as loose parts, as I guess they were.
Of course that wouldn’t get around informants or surveillance.
The ingenuity of people evading capital controls in kleptocratic countries should not be underestimated. Ultimately, the government wants to make it easier to steal private property by keeping it in the country. Whereas individuals want to keep their assets safe from government seizure by getting them out of the country.
$10m is a trifle compared to the amounts funneled out through bitcoin and similar instruments. $50b was smuggled out through crypto in 2020.
Both Russian and Chinese evasion of capital controls are likely inflating crypto values. The issue with BRICS countries trying to replace the dollar is the fact that they are ruled by kleptocrats and their citizens are perennially involved in trying to take their cash out by moving it into dollars, euros of whatever’s handy, out of their home governments’ reach.
I read a long thread on this somewhere.
the consensus from people who claimed to know was that
gold is black to x-rays, and other metals are not so much.
they said stuff coming into the us is all x-rayed and because this was anomalous someone actually checked.
yes I know we do some screening and read after the fact about how much radiation I was exposed to when I drove my convertible over the border
I personally don’t believe that. I more inclined to think parallel construction.
because if it wasn’t the parts would have been “lost” somehow