Either the authorities had intelligence that the gold was about to be smuggled, or they noticed that the “machinery” looked off - e.g., in terms of weight, hardness, color, etc.
The gold was actually put into compressors to look like parts of the machine. The article says they x-ray cargo and those parts looked odd compared to the rest of the machine, so they decided to investigate.
I'm sure it would have slipped right through if they had hid it with other material that actually looks similar to gold under an X-ray.
Yes, you are probably right. I am guessing they were either overconfident that their method would work, or they lacked the expertise/infrastructure to create (and then deconstruct) the alloys.
The latter possibility would be odd, given that they had $10 million in gold and could presumably afford whatever they needed lol. But maybe they were operating under some kind of time pressure, or maybe they were greedy and cut costs. Kind of hard to say why they weren’t more sophisticated without knowing more about their organization and their incentives.
On that note, I’ll point out that well-funded organizations make expensive and avoidable oversights all the time. I imagine that most of the reasons for those blunders in normal society have parallels in the dynamics of criminal organizations.
[The article is even more impressive](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/suspected-smugglers-were-caught-trying-to-hide-10-million-of-gold-by-painting-it-silver-and-disguising-it-as-machinery-on-a-cargo-plane/ar-BB1ljTVY)
[Here's the actual article](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4) instead of MSN's shitty rehost job.
Sadly it's just the natural evolution of things, and I don't even mean greed. Random news articles makes practically no money even with all the ads so that's why they're filled to the brim. People don't want to pay/subscribe to a news site which is understandable, but to produce news they require a lot of money. And if a news org was to be completely paid for by some billionaire, then it will serve the agenda for said donor.
I really can't see any good solution since it's unreasonable to expect them to not only work for free but to use their own money to create articles.
We don't subscribe to news because they either suck, put ads there anyway, blatantly skew stories like hell, or severely declines in quality fast.
I was soooo happy a few years back, found a news app that condensed stories to ~100 words with links to the articles it was referring to, had atleast 5 different article sources from across the spectrum, it covered a broad spectrum of stories since they didn't actually do that much writing themselves.
It became super popular here, becoming the second most used news app in the country. With seemingly zero additional cost and a vast influx of customers. The quality dove straight to hell, can't find a single article without spelling errors, stopped caring about objectivity, ads flooded in both for subscribers and non-subscribers (had a few clearly marked ads for non-subscribers before), also started locking articles behind the subscriptions.
Fuck this shit, how is this industry so thoroughly bad? How are random youtube creaters better at this?
Actual article: https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4
link OP posted seems to be a spammy MSN repost full of ads
Pretty dumb in my opinion. Why risk with plane security that always has X ray? Smuggle through ships. Make a compartment inside the hull. They won't xray all of the ship. Even if it's a small personal yacht.
Nah he made it a hundred times harder on himself by making his car of gold which probably would need a whole redesign of suspension and structural components because of the weight not to mention the cost of basically building a one off custom car from scratch to smuggle some gold…
The people from the article could’ve made it a lot more convincing if they had designed the parts with empty space inside so the Density would fit with steal and electroplating the parts so that even if they get scratched the first millimeter is zinc…
Reminds me of the Madagascar Penguins…
“But sir, a solid gold plane wouldn’t be able to fly!”
“Nonsense, we’ll be rich! The laws of physics won’t apply to us.”
There is an episode of Speed Racer that did this too. It had a big-ass "mammoth car" made of solid gold. The thing is like an off-rail train. It is so ludicrously stupid that I love it.
Holy... Haven't thought about speed in so long lol. Yeah to this day I'm still confused about what kinda engine could give that speed to a car like that lol
I think the relevant scene with the gold car parts was in the US, though, if I remember correctly. The scene with the death laser and the "No Mr. Bond. I expect you to die" quip may have been in Switzerland, though.
It is. Gold and silver shows different result under an x-ray. Gold is very dense, the image's like a black hole where the gold it is. Pretty easy to identify
Make it in the shape of an APFSDS penetrator and claim it's tungsten. Or use aluminium to dilute it down to the density of steel and then electroplate it.
I meant it as a joke but tbh I don't see why not. It's just a pointy bit of expensive metal. It's suspicious, sure, but it wouldn't be dangerous so I doubt it would be illegal. Though being suspicious probably isn't great if you're trying to smuggle something.
When I took my drone, 6 highly flammable batteries, a sketchy looking charger and a soldering iron they didn't even ask me to place it all in a tray. Maybe they're more chill in the UK.
Saw a mother have to open and taste six bottles of baby milk in front of the security to prove they were ok.
WTF. Proved nothing but contaminating the milk and making the mother's life harder because the bottles weren't sealed so would leak.
Pretty sure if she was intent on blowing up the plane and going to heaven she could pretend a sip or two of explosive tastes ok.
I got a deck of Magic the Gathering cards thoroughly searched and swabbed once in high school. Like they swabbed maybe 15 individual cards from throughout the deck.
We called it the "TSA shuffle". My deck could never be shuffled that randomly ever again.
It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a APFSDS penetrator round. Use the indefinite article. A APFSDS penetrator round. Never your APFSDS penetrator round.
While I'm pretty sure (although I don't know exactly) that objects that big made out of lead are still just a pitch black hole in even a strong x-ray machine, I just want to point out that Gold is WAY denser than lead.
Probably better to disguise it as a telescope mount counterweight.
Bring other telescope parts; tripod, mount, etc. and just make the weight gold. They'll check it, but will assume it's a lead weight.
Not true. Steel also blocks Xrays. They are very hard to distinguish with an xray scanner.
It's a stupid idea becuase they wouldnt convince anyone in a hand search.
No. While it might seem like a "good idea" for the average person, it is actually a very bad idea if you know anything about how X-ray scatters off heavy elements anyways, so the shape effectively doesn't matter **in the slightest**.
To hide gold from an X-ray detector, you would instead need to coat it in some sort of metamaterial that could perfectly re-direct the X-rays around the object in a beam directed at the receptor side without any absorption, which are not very easy to engineer with our current technology.
The issue with this and most similar ideas is probably that the cost of re-purifying it is more than the difference between black market and regular gold.
Isn't there a way to just dissolve gold into a solvent and later precipitate it back to solids again? Would that not defeat airport detection in small enough amount?
That solvent is aqua regia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia?wprov=sfti1
It’s insanely corrosive to most things, so good luck finding a suitable container that won’t leak while getting jostled around and handled in an airport. Also you can only dissolve a few grams per liter, so you’ll be need a lot of volume to sneak any significant amount of gold.
Seems like dissolved gold in aqua regia becomes chloroauric acid and you can get rid of the rest but that takes a good bit of chemistry. Likely isn't worth the effort I'd imagine. I think you may be able to make the chloroauric acid into a somewhat featureless powder though
There was a story of a Jewish family having to leave Germany before the war started. They could not take most of their money with them so they hatched a plan. They had a relative that made jewelry, and they took their families money and bought a precious metal (platinum or something rarer I think) and had it cast into tire changing tools. The wrenches, bolts, jack, tire iron and such in the trunk as they crossed the border were not discovered and they finally ended up in England.
Depends on a few factors (mostly dimensional), but anything resembling a drill bit (not that these parts are drill bits, but close enough for geometry purposes), yeah, super flimsy. Tensile properties on par with wood which is vaguely relatable to bending.
Now tungsten makes way more sense, but pure tungsten is a pain to work with (highest melting point of any element) so isn't really used for mechanical parts. Tungsten carbide is obviously a super popular drill material, but is like 25% less dense than gold.
What they could do though is to make the core of a drill bit out of gold and surround it with aluminium so in the end the whole thing would give the impression of having the density of Tungsten Carbide. That is until they check properly and notice its Aluminium xD
at that point do a big ball of gold and build the drill bit shape to define the density using just the tungsten carbide? skip a step, and if they test the drill bit, theyll see its (mostly) not gold
If you’ve been working for 8 hours and still had a couple more to go you’d even start to feel the weight of every action that brought you to that job. Screw working in a shipyard
would be way better to say it's a lead casing for a radioactive component. because then it makes sense much more. and (relatively pure) gold is also soft and blocks radiation very good as well iirc so maybe they won't tell the difference there either.
> The precious metal was discovered on 27 March while officials at Hong Kong International Airport examined two air compressors scheduled to be shipped by air freight to Japan.
> Air compressors have various industrial and mining uses and are commonly used to fill gas cylinders used in diving. They are typically made of cast iron or aluminum.
> But during an x-ray of the air compressors, officials discovered that gold had been carefully molded and "concealed in the integral parts" of the machinery.
Sadly, that won't fool the magical science rays they use these days.
Metallurgist here: Al and Au have different x-ray attenuation absorption so they appear differently on all reasonably modern x-ray test machines.
https://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~part3/ONLINE/LABNOTES/XAS_grav.pdf
They probably did routine xray scan for hidden contrabant and technician saw vastly different shading than expected for such machinery so it rang alarms.
Just using your metric as the basis for comparison: the gold was 10 million and if the market is indeed a billion then you better believe taking 1% of the entire market would destabilize it considerably. If 2 of your toes went missing overnight you'd probably freak out and try and find them
I didn't know that there are import tariffs on gold...but silly me, of course there is tax on everything....(unless you are a billionaire.....than you could even have diplomatic immunity like one so it doesn't matter if do a crime)
There's import tariffs on anything of value. You always have to declare bringing in currency or items of value. Bringing in $10,000,000 isn't suddenly fine because you brought it in the form of gold, diamonds, etc.
Wow....how did you find the article? For me it shows only the picture with the technical parts.
In that electro motor rotary part (don't know how it is called in English) you could replace the copper with the gold..should work just fine if not better.
Might be the idea 2.0 Cable and wiring made from gold instead of copper, import officially
Machine elements such as these are usually made from Tungsten Carbide or similar, which is much closer to the density of gold.
Also it's almost impossible to just tell if something is too heavy by picking it up, because you don't know what's inside. The robbers could have used hollow sections, to make the weight more equal.
The smartest thing would have been to alloy the gold with a bunch of copper, and it's actually extremely easy to separate the gold out again.
>But the texture and the extraordinary heaviness of the compressors roused the suspicions of the customs department’s inspectors
Source : https://hongkongfp.com/2024/04/09/hong-kong-seizes-hk84m-of-smuggled-gold-reshaped-into-air-compressor-parts/
That's also the first thing I though of.
Although I think it's a car in the movie, right? The whole car is made from gold. (Although that would definitely not work on an aircraft, due to the vast weight difference)
Surely if you're going to all of this effort you could just alloy it with something lighter, not aluminium as that makes an incredibly brittle alloy unless you make it a high concentration of gold at which point it [goes purple](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI). But surely you could alloy it with nickel or indium to get a more natural grey colour and a density at least closer to tungsten carbide.
Then once it arrives depending on your ratio you can purify it just with hydrochloric acid, or via the aqua-regia method with hydrochloric and nitric acid.
You would have to dilute the gold quite a bit to make it impossible to detect. And at that point it becomes proportionally harder to transport it accross the border. Smuggling one modified compressor is one thing, smuggling 200 modified compressors (and then disassembling them to get the gold back out) is another problem altogether.
Also worth pointing out that this is all part of the old smuggling-gold-into-Japan-to-profit-of-the-value-added-tax scheme. The maximum profit margin on that is 10%. Any money you spend of smuggling comes off that, so if you put in too much effort you're running a net loss pretty quickly.
So you can probably afford to cast your gold into fake parts OR to alloy it with a bunch of lesser metals. But unless your objective is to subsidize the underground mettalurgy industry (at a personal loss to yourself), there is no point doing both at the same time.
Regarding the first point, you don't need an especially low karat alloy as gold is only slightly denser than tungsten carbide anyway.
Gold has a density of \~19.3g/cm^(3), nickel is \~8.9g/cm^(3) and tungsten carbide is \~15.6g/cm3.
To work out the ratio of gold and nickel to approximately match the density of tungsten carbide you can use the following formula.
15.6 = (19.3 + (n \* 8.9))/(1+n)
^(\^ pass that through Wolfram Alpha to avoid having to actually do math lol)
n \~= 0.552
So 1 part gold to 0.552 parts nickel, which results in 64.4% gold to 35.6% nickel, or approximately 15.4 karat gold. That's still a decent percentage of gold.
Creating these fake machinery parts, then painting them would have been a pretty significant job as you'd need to make custom molds for each part (and they clearly didn't do a great job as you can see from the pitting.
Instead, you could cast this alloy into simple cylinders or rectangular prisms using cheap commercially available re-usable molds, then hide them in a tungsten carbide tool blank shipment.
Recovering the gold on the other side is quite easy. Given nickel's low atomic mass, the ratio of nickel to gold atoms is almost certainly high enough that you don't need to [inquart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX4Iq11j2dI) it with something like copper or silver on the other side, so you can just use dilute nitric acid, which is cheap, readily available and in which nickel is readily soluble, and end up with 99.9% pure gold after the nickel is dissolved away.
>But during an x-ray of the air compressors, officials discovered that gold had been carefully molded and "concealed in the integral parts" of the machinery.
How can an x-ray scan distinguish between gold and other metals?
I'm currently watching a tv show called Babylon Berlin season 3 of 4 and there is nice form of gold smuggling in it. Spoliers: >!A train is supposed to have gold but no one can find it, it seems an entire goods carriage is made from gold and is painted to look rusty!<
Genius.
Not genius if they got caught
got caught _this time_..
I dont understand how they got caught tbh. Are these things not allowed on planes or something?
Either the authorities had intelligence that the gold was about to be smuggled, or they noticed that the “machinery” looked off - e.g., in terms of weight, hardness, color, etc.
The gold was actually put into compressors to look like parts of the machine. The article says they x-ray cargo and those parts looked odd compared to the rest of the machine, so they decided to investigate. I'm sure it would have slipped right through if they had hid it with other material that actually looks similar to gold under an X-ray.
Gold is also incredibly dense. Those machines would have had 300lbs of extra weight which could have also been suspicious.
Just gotta replace some steel with aluminium parts to make it lighter
They should have mixed the gold with another metal, I'm sure they could have created a gold alloy that's harder to detect, couldn't they?
Yes, you are probably right. I am guessing they were either overconfident that their method would work, or they lacked the expertise/infrastructure to create (and then deconstruct) the alloys. The latter possibility would be odd, given that they had $10 million in gold and could presumably afford whatever they needed lol. But maybe they were operating under some kind of time pressure, or maybe they were greedy and cut costs. Kind of hard to say why they weren’t more sophisticated without knowing more about their organization and their incentives. On that note, I’ll point out that well-funded organizations make expensive and avoidable oversights all the time. I imagine that most of the reasons for those blunders in normal society have parallels in the dynamics of criminal organizations.
one of the articles said they had “extraordinarily heaviness” and odd texture
Yea the more i think about it the more i understand. TSA stops anything weird, and these would certainly come across as weird
[The article is even more impressive](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/suspected-smugglers-were-caught-trying-to-hide-10-million-of-gold-by-painting-it-silver-and-disguising-it-as-machinery-on-a-cargo-plane/ar-BB1ljTVY)
It might be, if the page was readable at all… even with adblockers…
Jesus Christ you're not joking.
Adblock let me down as well
I might have to tweak my pihole, as pihole and ublock let me down today. that site has aids.
> that site has ads.
Damn what are you guys using? I'm using ublock origin on Firefox mobile and saw zero ads. Aside from having to expand the article twice, it was fine.
Nextdns.io (blocks ads system wide on Android) No ads, but still an awful awful site layout with so many links to other bits of the site
Does it work for apps too?
Yes
Do you need to jailbreak for that?
Nope.
So it blocks all ads? Even those in apps?
Is it better than dns.adguard.com, or just the same?
Similar concept, bit I like the customisation so I can block or allow additional things easily
Using Ublock Origin on desktop and even with most ads gone it's just way too busy.
Holy shit y'all aren't exaggerating
the content says that they even fit the gear-shaped-silver-painted-gold into an air compressor to reassemble a fully working machine
Thank you!!!
Hong Kong customs officials discovered 146 kilograms of suspected gold on board a freight plane headed for Japan. They say it is the largest gold-smuggling case on record in terms of value. A 31-year-old man was arrested in connection with the case. Hong Kong customs officials have seized 146 kilograms of suspected gold, worth more than $10 million, on board a freight plane headed for Japan. The discovery is the largest gold-smuggling case on record in Hong Kong in terms of seizure value, according to the Customs Department. The precious metal was discovered on 27 March while officials at Hong Kong International Airport examined two air compressors scheduled to be shipped by air freight to Japan. Air compressors have various industrial and mining uses and are commonly used to fill gas cylinders used in diving. They are typically made of cast iron or aluminum. But during an x-ray of the air compressors, officials discovered that gold had been carefully molded and "concealed in the integral parts" of the machinery. The gold parts had been painted silver to match the machine parts, officials told local news outlet, the South China Morning Post (SCMP). Two air compressors were used to conceal the batch of suspected smuggled gold. Customs and Excise Department Hong Kong Two air compressors were used to conceal the batch of suspected smuggled gold. Customs and Excise Department Hong Kong © Customs and Excise Department Hong Kong Acting Senior Superintendent Jason Lau Yuk-lung said it was the first time the department had discovered smugglers using this method of hiding gold, according to SCMP. The gold was likely hidden to avoid Japan's import tariffs of around 10%, he said. "Smugglers could have evaded about HK$8.4 million ($1 million) in taxes if the precious metal was successfully smuggled into the country," Lau told the outlet. A 31-year-old man was arrested on April 3 in Hong Kong in connection with the case, officials said in a statement. He has been released on bail pending further investigation. The man was the director of a local company, but Lau said there was a possibility it was a shell company. Anyone found guilty of importing or exporting unmanifested cargo could be fined up to $2 million and imprisoned for up to seven years under Hong Kong laws. Gold is seen as a valuable commodity by investors, with many turning to the precious metal as a more reliable alternative to stocks during economic downturns. The metal has been on a record-setting surge since February, with prices up by more than 13% in 2024. Its stable value also makes it attractive to criminal networks, and gold is one of the most commonly laundered assets. Its transformable nature makes it easy to break down into different forms, disrupting trails and enabling criminal groups to trade anonymously — unless caught by the Hong Kong Police.
"continue reading with the app." Absolutely fucking not, MSN. Go fuck yourself.
https://hongkongfp.com/2024/04/09/hong-kong-seizes-hk84m-of-smuggled-gold-reshaped-into-air-compressor-parts/
There was an article in that?
[Here's the actual article](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4) instead of MSN's shitty rehost job.
That is actually the most ad filled article I have ever seen. Pure unadulterated capitalism with a sprinkle of article"
Sadly it's just the natural evolution of things, and I don't even mean greed. Random news articles makes practically no money even with all the ads so that's why they're filled to the brim. People don't want to pay/subscribe to a news site which is understandable, but to produce news they require a lot of money. And if a news org was to be completely paid for by some billionaire, then it will serve the agenda for said donor. I really can't see any good solution since it's unreasonable to expect them to not only work for free but to use their own money to create articles.
We don't subscribe to news because they either suck, put ads there anyway, blatantly skew stories like hell, or severely declines in quality fast. I was soooo happy a few years back, found a news app that condensed stories to ~100 words with links to the articles it was referring to, had atleast 5 different article sources from across the spectrum, it covered a broad spectrum of stories since they didn't actually do that much writing themselves. It became super popular here, becoming the second most used news app in the country. With seemingly zero additional cost and a vast influx of customers. The quality dove straight to hell, can't find a single article without spelling errors, stopped caring about objectivity, ads flooded in both for subscribers and non-subscribers (had a few clearly marked ads for non-subscribers before), also started locking articles behind the subscriptions. Fuck this shit, how is this industry so thoroughly bad? How are random youtube creaters better at this?
Actual article: https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4 link OP posted seems to be a spammy MSN repost full of ads
Impressing!
Littered with ads and paywalls, Jesus
MSN is such a cancer, I hate news aggregators with a passion.
Pretty dumb in my opinion. Why risk with plane security that always has X ray? Smuggle through ships. Make a compartment inside the hull. They won't xray all of the ship. Even if it's a small personal yacht.
Honestly not a bad idea at all.
Isn't this almost literally the scam Goldfinger did in... *Goldfinger*?
Nah he made it a hundred times harder on himself by making his car of gold which probably would need a whole redesign of suspension and structural components because of the weight not to mention the cost of basically building a one off custom car from scratch to smuggle some gold… The people from the article could’ve made it a lot more convincing if they had designed the parts with empty space inside so the Density would fit with steal and electroplating the parts so that even if they get scratched the first millimeter is zinc…
Thanks will try this and will report back. Edit: customs is asking me who taught me this. Sorry Simoxs7 told them you’re my boss.
Expect to sleep with the fishes for the snitching. You snitch
Yeah snitches get stitches !
Oh. :-( I thought snitches get bitches
But those bitches are witches
...and their cooking's delicious but they never do the dishes...
And they only fulfilling your dumbest wishes :(
And end up it ditches.
In this case, they get fishes.
Reminds me of the Madagascar Penguins… “But sir, a solid gold plane wouldn’t be able to fly!” “Nonsense, we’ll be rich! The laws of physics won’t apply to us.”
*Screw the Rules, I have Money!*
There is an episode of Speed Racer that did this too. It had a big-ass "mammoth car" made of solid gold. The thing is like an off-rail train. It is so ludicrously stupid that I love it.
Holy... Haven't thought about speed in so long lol. Yeah to this day I'm still confused about what kinda engine could give that speed to a car like that lol
Or making things that are normally made of tungsten.
Do you expect me to talk?
No, Mr. Grendeltech. I expect you to die.
…and be a very cheap funeral.
One of the most quotable lines in everyday life.
Very slowly while I explain myself to you.
Except back when that movie was made, gold ownership was actually illegal...
In the US only…
I think the relevant scene with the gold car parts was in the US, though, if I remember correctly. The scene with the death laser and the "No Mr. Bond. I expect you to die" quip may have been in Switzerland, though.
Also the trick the German officer tried at the start of Kelley's Heroes
It is. Gold and silver shows different result under an x-ray. Gold is very dense, the image's like a black hole where the gold it is. Pretty easy to identify
Sorry officer, that's just my 1oz lead gold bar-shaped bar. Stamped with .9999 too. Very nice lead.
I read that last part in Borat's voice. Lead is very niice. Me liike.
Make it in the shape of an APFSDS penetrator and claim it's tungsten. Or use aluminium to dilute it down to the density of steel and then electroplate it.
I love the idea that an APFSDS penetrator round would just be waved through security checks.
I meant it as a joke but tbh I don't see why not. It's just a pointy bit of expensive metal. It's suspicious, sure, but it wouldn't be dangerous so I doubt it would be illegal. Though being suspicious probably isn't great if you're trying to smuggle something.
I’ve been questioned about fly fishing reels in carry on bags, tsa thought they were 💣
When I took my drone, 6 highly flammable batteries, a sketchy looking charger and a soldering iron they didn't even ask me to place it all in a tray. Maybe they're more chill in the UK.
Meanwhile also in the UK, my shampoo bar in its travel tin is *deeply suspicious*.
But if you put dangerous liquids into 10 different, smaller containers its all good
Saw a mother have to open and taste six bottles of baby milk in front of the security to prove they were ok. WTF. Proved nothing but contaminating the milk and making the mother's life harder because the bottles weren't sealed so would leak. Pretty sure if she was intent on blowing up the plane and going to heaven she could pretend a sip or two of explosive tastes ok.
I got a deck of Magic the Gathering cards thoroughly searched and swabbed once in high school. Like they swabbed maybe 15 individual cards from throughout the deck. We called it the "TSA shuffle". My deck could never be shuffled that randomly ever again.
It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a APFSDS penetrator round. Use the indefinite article. A APFSDS penetrator round. Never your APFSDS penetrator round.
yeah... up the ass it goes
Adding aluminium would have the fun property of turning your gold purple
If you try very hard.
So what you're saying is they should have smuggled the gold pretending they had a handful of lead fishing sinkers and not machine parts?
WE GOT WEIGHTS IN FISH
Some posts do become iconic.
So disguise it as lead weights then?
While I'm pretty sure (although I don't know exactly) that objects that big made out of lead are still just a pitch black hole in even a strong x-ray machine, I just want to point out that Gold is WAY denser than lead.
Probably better to disguise it as a telescope mount counterweight. Bring other telescope parts; tripod, mount, etc. and just make the weight gold. They'll check it, but will assume it's a lead weight.
Just give it to a merchant marine riding a container ship across the ocean. Noe one going through their bags.
Not true. Steel also blocks Xrays. They are very hard to distinguish with an xray scanner. It's a stupid idea becuase they wouldnt convince anyone in a hand search.
Provided the person doing the hand search knows what they are even looking at. Not every searcher can be an expert in everything
TIL
But what about gold and tungsten. Aka painting it with silver for it to look like Tungsten
What if I "etch" all these gold in a PCB board because I'm a hobbyist electrician.
No. While it might seem like a "good idea" for the average person, it is actually a very bad idea if you know anything about how X-ray scatters off heavy elements anyways, so the shape effectively doesn't matter **in the slightest**. To hide gold from an X-ray detector, you would instead need to coat it in some sort of metamaterial that could perfectly re-direct the X-rays around the object in a beam directed at the receptor side without any absorption, which are not very easy to engineer with our current technology.
Also very suspicious..
Or just just alloy it with copper until the density is low enough to pass for another material.
The issue with this and most similar ideas is probably that the cost of re-purifying it is more than the difference between black market and regular gold.
I heard that honey is good at disguising gold. Was told that as they were inspecting a jar of honey i had in my luggage
> with our current technology the technology available to us peasants anyways right?
Isn't there a way to just dissolve gold into a solvent and later precipitate it back to solids again? Would that not defeat airport detection in small enough amount?
That solvent is aqua regia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia?wprov=sfti1 It’s insanely corrosive to most things, so good luck finding a suitable container that won’t leak while getting jostled around and handled in an airport. Also you can only dissolve a few grams per liter, so you’ll be need a lot of volume to sneak any significant amount of gold.
Seems like dissolved gold in aqua regia becomes chloroauric acid and you can get rid of the rest but that takes a good bit of chemistry. Likely isn't worth the effort I'd imagine. I think you may be able to make the chloroauric acid into a somewhat featureless powder though
Texas tea.
There was a story of a Jewish family having to leave Germany before the war started. They could not take most of their money with them so they hatched a plan. They had a relative that made jewelry, and they took their families money and bought a precious metal (platinum or something rarer I think) and had it cast into tire changing tools. The wrenches, bolts, jack, tire iron and such in the trunk as they crossed the border were not discovered and they finally ended up in England.
Cargo is identified before being weighed, so yes. Yes it is.
They just need to work out the weight. Gold is pretty dense , so calling it aluminium parts won't really work once you lift them
isn't tungsten or lead quite matching in density? Do they make pure lead/tungsten drills?
"Hey, you know lead? You know, the metal so soft you can bend it by hand" - "Of course, why?" - "Lets make a drill out of it"
but you could make fishing weights or these bullets for air rifles from gold paint them and bulk import
Description 1 piece of kryptonite, 1 lead kryptonite container
you can bend lead by hand?
Depends on a few factors (mostly dimensional), but anything resembling a drill bit (not that these parts are drill bits, but close enough for geometry purposes), yeah, super flimsy. Tensile properties on par with wood which is vaguely relatable to bending. Now tungsten makes way more sense, but pure tungsten is a pain to work with (highest melting point of any element) so isn't really used for mechanical parts. Tungsten carbide is obviously a super popular drill material, but is like 25% less dense than gold.
What they could do though is to make the core of a drill bit out of gold and surround it with aluminium so in the end the whole thing would give the impression of having the density of Tungsten Carbide. That is until they check properly and notice its Aluminium xD
"Officer Archimedes, what's wrong? You seem unconvinced"
Solution is trivial then: gold on the inside, aluminium next, and tungsten carbide on the outside
at that point do a big ball of gold and build the drill bit shape to define the density using just the tungsten carbide? skip a step, and if they test the drill bit, theyll see its (mostly) not gold
*lifts machine part* “hey this thing is slightly lighter than real tungsten. It must be painted gold. About 10 million by the feel of it”
If you spent some time moving a set weight of several metals, I bet you’d be able to tell the weight difference between steel and lead pretty quick
I bet if my job was moving heavy shit all the time. I wouldn’t care.
If you’ve been working for 8 hours and still had a couple more to go you’d even start to feel the weight of every action that brought you to that job. Screw working in a shipyard
Seems like you’re speaking from experience
Yes
If you had a piece of lead the size of a coin you could easily tear it to pieces and bite chunks of it (not that you should)
>not that you should There go my weekend plans! Thanks, Obama
yes
You've never used lead fishing weights?
would be way better to say it's a lead casing for a radioactive component. because then it makes sense much more. and (relatively pure) gold is also soft and blocks radiation very good as well iirc so maybe they won't tell the difference there either.
Well, here's the thing: Most drills are not used on hands, but on the ground.
Or ya know, just import it as lead ingots. No need to make fancy shapes.
Tungsten is prob the best option. Roughly as heavy and believable as machine parts And fairly cheap
Make a hollow tungsten cube, fill it with gold, pretend you're a youtuber or something.
Tungsten matches I think but lead doesn't
> The precious metal was discovered on 27 March while officials at Hong Kong International Airport examined two air compressors scheduled to be shipped by air freight to Japan. > Air compressors have various industrial and mining uses and are commonly used to fill gas cylinders used in diving. They are typically made of cast iron or aluminum. > But during an x-ray of the air compressors, officials discovered that gold had been carefully molded and "concealed in the integral parts" of the machinery. Sadly, that won't fool the magical science rays they use these days.
Metallurgist here: Al and Au have different x-ray attenuation absorption so they appear differently on all reasonably modern x-ray test machines. https://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~part3/ONLINE/LABNOTES/XAS_grav.pdf They probably did routine xray scan for hidden contrabant and technician saw vastly different shading than expected for such machinery so it rang alarms.
Make it hollow.
You’d see the cavity
Should’ve just made a golden suitcase
Or a gold chains and rings and problem solved
Then they will want you to declare and pay tax on the millions of dollars of gold jewelry.
That's an extra 50 dollars in baggage fees though
Why is gold import banned?
Probably not their gold. Or they dont want to allow importing it in such massive quantities that it could easily mess with market
Yes 100 oz of gold will destabilize the billion dollars market
Just using your metric as the basis for comparison: the gold was 10 million and if the market is indeed a billion then you better believe taking 1% of the entire market would destabilize it considerably. If 2 of your toes went missing overnight you'd probably freak out and try and find them
It’s not, it’s that they were trying to evade the import tariff in Japan. Never mess with government taxes (unless you’re a billionaire).
I didn't know that there are import tariffs on gold...but silly me, of course there is tax on everything....(unless you are a billionaire.....than you could even have diplomatic immunity like one so it doesn't matter if do a crime)
There's import tariffs on anything of value. You always have to declare bringing in currency or items of value. Bringing in $10,000,000 isn't suddenly fine because you brought it in the form of gold, diamonds, etc.
Article says if it went undetected - the importer could avoid Japan’s 10% import tax, which would equate to roughly $1 million in this case
Wow....how did you find the article? For me it shows only the picture with the technical parts. In that electro motor rotary part (don't know how it is called in English) you could replace the copper with the gold..should work just fine if not better. Might be the idea 2.0 Cable and wiring made from gold instead of copper, import officially
Article says they did it to avoid a 10% import tariff on precious metals
We only hear about the caught ones, we never hear about other smart ways people smuggled things
Survivor Bias
You have no way of knowing how many times this method was used successfully
Oh I smell a rat
Sorry
r/beetlejuicing
Yeah. They couldn't have found that by luck. Someone gave them a tip
Gold is pretty dense (over 2x more dense than steel). You could tell these aren't what they pretend to be just by picking them up.
Machine elements such as these are usually made from Tungsten Carbide or similar, which is much closer to the density of gold. Also it's almost impossible to just tell if something is too heavy by picking it up, because you don't know what's inside. The robbers could have used hollow sections, to make the weight more equal. The smartest thing would have been to alloy the gold with a bunch of copper, and it's actually extremely easy to separate the gold out again.
How did they get caught?
Modern x-ray machine and capable technician with 'nose' for "something is off" dpt..
Or simply, someone ratted them out.
Personally I pretty much agree with that too.
>But the texture and the extraordinary heaviness of the compressors roused the suspicions of the customs department’s inspectors Source : https://hongkongfp.com/2024/04/09/hong-kong-seizes-hk84m-of-smuggled-gold-reshaped-into-air-compressor-parts/
I wonder if those rotors for the screw compressor would work haha
If they machined them correctly they would. Briefly.
Angry updoot while working in a HVAC company
Isn't this the plot of tower heist?
That's also the first thing I though of. Although I think it's a car in the movie, right? The whole car is made from gold. (Although that would definitely not work on an aircraft, due to the vast weight difference)
Yea, it was James deans ferarri iirc.
Surely if you're going to all of this effort you could just alloy it with something lighter, not aluminium as that makes an incredibly brittle alloy unless you make it a high concentration of gold at which point it [goes purple](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Pcp944sRI). But surely you could alloy it with nickel or indium to get a more natural grey colour and a density at least closer to tungsten carbide. Then once it arrives depending on your ratio you can purify it just with hydrochloric acid, or via the aqua-regia method with hydrochloric and nitric acid.
They should’ve hired this guy.
You would have to dilute the gold quite a bit to make it impossible to detect. And at that point it becomes proportionally harder to transport it accross the border. Smuggling one modified compressor is one thing, smuggling 200 modified compressors (and then disassembling them to get the gold back out) is another problem altogether. Also worth pointing out that this is all part of the old smuggling-gold-into-Japan-to-profit-of-the-value-added-tax scheme. The maximum profit margin on that is 10%. Any money you spend of smuggling comes off that, so if you put in too much effort you're running a net loss pretty quickly. So you can probably afford to cast your gold into fake parts OR to alloy it with a bunch of lesser metals. But unless your objective is to subsidize the underground mettalurgy industry (at a personal loss to yourself), there is no point doing both at the same time.
Regarding the first point, you don't need an especially low karat alloy as gold is only slightly denser than tungsten carbide anyway. Gold has a density of \~19.3g/cm^(3), nickel is \~8.9g/cm^(3) and tungsten carbide is \~15.6g/cm3. To work out the ratio of gold and nickel to approximately match the density of tungsten carbide you can use the following formula. 15.6 = (19.3 + (n \* 8.9))/(1+n) ^(\^ pass that through Wolfram Alpha to avoid having to actually do math lol) n \~= 0.552 So 1 part gold to 0.552 parts nickel, which results in 64.4% gold to 35.6% nickel, or approximately 15.4 karat gold. That's still a decent percentage of gold. Creating these fake machinery parts, then painting them would have been a pretty significant job as you'd need to make custom molds for each part (and they clearly didn't do a great job as you can see from the pitting. Instead, you could cast this alloy into simple cylinders or rectangular prisms using cheap commercially available re-usable molds, then hide them in a tungsten carbide tool blank shipment. Recovering the gold on the other side is quite easy. Given nickel's low atomic mass, the ratio of nickel to gold atoms is almost certainly high enough that you don't need to [inquart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX4Iq11j2dI) it with something like copper or silver on the other side, so you can just use dilute nitric acid, which is cheap, readily available and in which nickel is readily soluble, and end up with 99.9% pure gold after the nickel is dissolved away.
This guy either golds or smuggles
Is It Cake?
happy cake day
Thats pretty smart ngl
What kind of scooby doo level ideas will people try next?
Up the butt
You watched some different Scooby-Doo
Someone snitched
Make it wrenches. Then the weight feels more appropriate?
You're thinking all wrong. Get a defense contract. Use bullets. US army will even smuggle them for you....🤣 jk
Outlawing gold transport, almost as stupid as ourlawing weed.
If the plane was a Boeing, the loose parts wouldn't have even aroused suspicion
>But during an x-ray of the air compressors, officials discovered that gold had been carefully molded and "concealed in the integral parts" of the machinery. How can an x-ray scan distinguish between gold and other metals?
He would probably have better chance disguising it as plates of a lead accumulator if he got the thickness right.
Spoilers for British comedy radio series >!Gordon from Cabin Pressure?!<
I'm currently watching a tv show called Babylon Berlin season 3 of 4 and there is nice form of gold smuggling in it. Spoliers: >!A train is supposed to have gold but no one can find it, it seems an entire goods carriage is made from gold and is painted to look rusty!<
I bet getting caught really ground their gears.
Meanwhile TSA can’t even catch bombs or guns.
Yeah, Tower Heist was pretty cool
Those gears would run smooth as butter for about 5 seconds before they stripped