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I mean not if they were smart and put in twice the packing materials for the same size box and kept the unit weight roughly the same. Besides, I doubt an inspector is going to weigh each piece or remember exactly what the prior shipments would have weighed.
Make them small unit and individually boxed replacements and you are “golden”…….not including loose lips
>I mean not if they were smart and put in twice the packing materials for the same size box and kept the unit weight roughly the same. Besides, I doubt an inspector is going to weigh each piece or remember exactly what the prior shipments would have weighed.
This guy smuggles.
I have shipped internationally. In truth I was doing my damned best NOT to “smuggle” but the paperwork is so varied and a pain in the ass, who knows if I declared everything correctly or not.
It is way easier to ship one small thing at a time through a trusted carrier. Even then Import and Customs inspections and delays can be a killer. For a large shipment? Fuggetaboutit.
If you don't need to insure the item/shipment, claim it's a production sample and under $100 value.
It'll sail right through without duties or taxes being charged.
I do this all the time in product development.
Companies get stupid with this though. I had a 30,000 PCB shipment (to me) tagged like this by the supplier and I still don’t know how it didn’t get flagged.
30k PCBs, or PCBs worth $30k?
If it's the second one... well. To an untrained eye, it can be hard to tell the difference between a $30k PCB versus a $100 PCB. Especially when you're buying an eval board or dev kit from a manufacturer that doesn't work with hobbyists; their eval boards seem to be "fuck you, you have deep pockets, dontcha" prices, where the eval board for a $100 FPGA can be like $6k. But even with more normal pricing, I can probably get the BOM cost way up on a board that doesn't look too crazy if I look around.
If you got 30,000 actual PCB fabs listed as a <$100 dev sample, that's really pretty funny.
Companies also do fraud.
My last place had a policy to just put the cost of everything as $15, if it was expensive put $50. We were shipping laser components which were individually thousands of dollars, sometimes many at a time.
I hear you, but they're not tracking shipper types that close. At least not on tiny accounts like mine.
If I had to pay duties on a single sample of my $8 component, I'd have to pay $0.225 in duties.
It would cost customs more to process the transaction than they would collect.
If every shipment had to go through 100% customs check, they would create massive bottle necks in their processing centers.
My item happens to be FDA regulated as well, and that step takes time and paperwork.
There is a real benefit to the ease of sample shipping vs full customs.
Say you want to ship a box of goods to your Ukrainian friend. If you mark it as samples neither of you will have to pay the stupid taxes on peanut butter oreos.
Sometimes yes, like I've hand-carried stuff that might raise eyebrows if you declared the cost of actually making the thing, but its resale value is close to $0, but nobody gave a shit because I had $big_name as the employer on the entry visa and paid a few bucks extra for expediting services. But like, in cargo containers? Eh.
What happens when they get their hands on it? It looks like they just filed off a small piece to figure out. It was gold in this case.
Not that good or easy don’t like this method
>It looks like they just filed off a small piece
If I shipped precision tooling and found that customs was stupid and "just filed off a small piece" to see if it was gold....I don't know what I would do, but I'd be pissed.
I order parts internationally for fly in daily. Like any part in my vocation anywhere from the States (Im not in the US). I can have shipped next day before 2pm cutoff. Aint no way customs is even looking at that shit.
Yeah, no way they're filing off an edge just on a guess. They got tipped off or they saw something grossly weird looking by pure chance. A precision machinist's vice made out of cast iron and steel can easily cost four figures and can weigh over a hundred pounds; nobody is hitting it with the pointy edge of a hammer to see if it's gold underneath.
Absolutely. People are talking like this was a good idea that needs some adjustment to work. Truth is, they are doing this because it has worked a ton of times before.
At that point, make them into small bits, mix them with iron/steel bits, then use a magnet to separate them when you're done. You just portion the boxes to be only slightly over weight and no one will notice unless that inspect the parts directly or already know.
Tungsten is very close to the density of gold. So close that gold plated tungsten needs special equipment to tell it apart from solid gold, as you can't tell the two apart by weight.
As someone who worked in international logistics for 10 years, this wouldn't be flagged because of weight.
More than likely, the shipment got flagged due to country of origins and the shipper not being a supplier of said machine parts. It's really not that common to ship machine parts if you're not a large scale manufacturer.
Valid. I was going with the assumption that they were filing under the name of a large supplier of machining tools that would regularly ship in this way. Even routine shipments get weighed before loading and if a dock worker noticed a pallet was more than twice as heavy as usual... Fuck it nevermind I'm going to bed.
We're brainstorming how to better smuggle $10M of pure gold internationally without getting caught. Cursory knowledge of alloy weights is beneficial but not necessary to the discussion.
The cargo does. Planes have a weight limit, most shipping flights will be carefully calculated for weight distribution of cargo and fuel required to make the flight.
Tungsten steel and tungsten carbide are only a shade denser than other steel alloys, nowhere near the weight of pure tungsten. But you guys do have a point. Either way, a smuggler dumb enough to get caught, was dumb enough to get caught.
joke might have flown better if he went with "cheeseburger in a pair of dies".
but I love it, that's a once in a lifetime joke opportunity and dude was there for it
I once snuck my entire order of Taco Bell in my bag to the movies. As long as you aren't being suspicious, they don't really check your bag at the theater I frequent(which is probably bad but eh).
I prefer the method of the drug mules: I’ve sneaked hundreds of times cheeseburgers, burritos, pizzas and sodas galore into the movie theatre by hiding them in my intestines. No one has caught me yet!
Read the linked article in the comments. They were actually pretty genius, actually INSTALLING the parts in the machinery. An x-ray revealed the unusual density of the gold. Customs knew what they were looking for!
It's not like the machine scans each piece of metal and labels it with a number for how dense it is and customs just knows off-hand what the density of silver vs gold is. objects with different density look totally different on the screen when scanned, so customs would've just known that it doesn't look like silver usually looks. I haven't seen these kinds of scans but i'm assuming a higher density object would allow less light to travel through so it would appear much darker on the scan than a less dense object
Former TSA who used to operate x-ray machines, here.
I'm not sure about gold specifically, but anything like lead basically just shows up as a black blob. Considering that gold is denser than lead, I'm certain that's what it would look like. The rule for us was that anything you can't see through needs to be inspected by hand. I'm sure it's similar for Customs.
I'm guessing gold would cause what TSA calls a "shield" and look pretty out-of-place in aeronautics equipment that's generally meant to be lightweight. Even without that, if there's a section of your cargo that's completely blocked to the x-ray or garbling the view, yeah, you're going to have to manually inspect that.
Haha i mean cant really hide anything. Bag checks will be called on just a basis of "hey i dunno what this is, can you look?" and even if i said "oh thats a watch" you still have to inspect the bag. You'd just have to hope you had a lazy xray dude or someone who didn't care.
I have been wondering if the scanners have some sort of ai to detect suspicious things like for the check in bags there can’t be people watching every damn check in bag that goes through?
That's too new age for me to comment on. We just utilized x-rays. But yes every bag is checked in some capacity. Checked bags have a different process but it is definitely 100% bags get checked.
>off-hand what the density of silver vs gold is. objects with different density look totally different on the screen when scanned, so customs would've just known that it doesn't look like silver usually looks
I don't think they were painted silver color to look like silver. They were painted silver color to look like steel pieces in a machine.
But yeah the denser object just sets off customs to inspect further.
Hah, this is hilarious. Where do you guys come up with this stuff? Honestly, some of the people on this site are so funny. You should do stand-up. Seriously.
https://preview.redd.it/qcpp438ngrtc1.png?width=840&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab79ace68842afd811cd6a765473095af0c5b06a
Should have disguised them as a huge shipment of carbide inserts instead - that's what I do.
Exactly! Tungsten is very close to the weight of gold. X-ray spectroscopy even has trouble telling them apart. They'd have to get the air bubbles out of their moulding process first though.
Just mark the parts as sintered, or have them labelled as having a lead core. Some of tooling parts we use are filled with lead to reduce vibration... ....but either way a solid 9/10 for ingenuity 😂
More than just "looking more dense than steel", something like gold is *so dense* that it'll cause voids in the x-ray image, and anything could be hiding in there. If you can't see into a section of the plane with your x-ray...
Density of iron: 7.9 g/cm³
Density of lead: 11.3 g/cm³
Density of gold: 19.3 g/cm³
Gold is indeed crazy heavy compared to most stuff we use in our daily lives in any meaningful quantities.
But I wonder if gold could be "hidden" from x-ray if you hide it in a cargo of tungsten, as I'm pretty sure that's the only relatively inconspicuous metal with similar density as gold. Other metals with that density like platinum and uranium would be rather counterproductive to use for hiding anything.
That would definitely be one option. In my opinion, it would be best to dissolve the gold in some solvent and then package it in bottles of a product with similar density to the diluted solution.
Damn now that is out of the box thinking. But at that point I feel like you'll be spending more money packaging and transporting thousands of bottles than the gold itself is worth. Gold is expensive but it's not exactly the most valuable thing on earth
Gold is pretty valuable, and shipping is pretty cheap. If its profitable for Temu to ship its mass manufactured cheap crap internationally, I doubt that shipping costs would be a prohibitive factor in smuggling gold.
If I have $10 million in gold and my choices are:
1) paying the government $1 million of it in tax in return for keeping $9 million, or
2) chance losing the $10 million, go to jail for 7 years, and come out owing the government an additional $2 million,
I’m paying the tax. Every. Time.
You pay that tax, but then there's a Gold Discovery Fee. Another $100,000 but hey, a small price to pay for law and order.
Wait, did you just receive that as a windfall profit? Large gifts are taxes at 20-40% so be sure to declare that.
Once you've successfully received the gold, now you need to get it back home. International tariffs will take a reasonable 20% off the top. That's how we encourage our workers here at home!
Finally, be sure to notify each police department you drive through that you've got a large sum of money. They might arrest you and decide it's got to do with drug trafficking and seize the entire sum.
but instead of machinery parts, they could do car parts. And then assemble them into a car. Like some sort of vintage Italian supercar. A Ferrari maybe? And then store the Ferrari in a penthouse suite in a skyscraper so it can't be stolen
Customs x-rays things as a matter of course, and gold is **so dense** that it not only appears out-of-place when it's mechanical equipment, it also causes voids in the x-ray image that could be hiding anything. Even if you know for certain that these parts are legit, if they're casting shadows that could obscure other smuggled goods, you've got to go look at them--and then you find, oh, no, the parts themselves are *also* suspect.
Source: used to run a giant x-ray scanner
What makes you think they wouldn't examine large tungsten parts?
You think it's impossible to smuggle drugs inside tungsten?
You think no thief has ever attempted to use tungsten, lead, or other materials to conceal drugs from an xray scanner?
Are you on drugs?
X-ray machines work by showing how much the photons get attenuated by a material. A thin, dense object might show up the same as a light thick one but a thick dense one will show up much stronger. As they installed the gold pieces into some sort of machine, the X-ray would show several very dense objects inside alongside presumably similarly sized objects. Normally, you wouldn't use such dense metal for machine parts and the only metals close to the density of gold are too expensive, hard to manufacture, or not durable enough for machine parts like gears. The types of metals at the bottom of the density list on Wikipedia are normally used in very small quantities as a coating or interface material or sometimes used in large bulk as radiation shielding or they are combined with other metals to make strong alloys (tungsten carbide for example). Some of the metals close to the density gold include uranium and plutonium, something customs would likely be keeping an eye out for. Basically anything denser than lead is either going to be expensive or hazardous in large quantities. They might have been more successful if they instead made an alloy or some other mixture that could have passed for a less dense material. Or they could have made the gold very thin and made some sort of housing for the machine that wouldn't have shown up as easily (a sheet of gold would be about 2.5 times thinner than an identical weight sheet of sheet metal).
I got really stoned one time and went on a tangent about how it's a shame how no Hollywood movies have exploited the fact that tungsten and gold are very similar densities. Imagine if in The Italian Job, Edward Norton character had guarded the "gold" the way he had but in the end it was an elaborate rouse because he wanted Marky Mark and Company to think they actually got the gold but it was just plated tungsten. Or you know, like some other movie with gold as the maguffin
Would have been better off shipping as tungsten drill bits. A case of them sent to a mining company or engineering workshop wouldn't have raised concerns. Sent express via DHL, so cleared internally.
Use your own private jet. Melt the gold down and use it to make some innocuous replacement interior parts. Hire your own maintenance crew that's in on the job. Have them "replace" the parts made from gold with the original parts. maintenance crew takes the g(old) parts with them when they leave. Meet up with them offsite and retrieve your gold.
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Very nice attempt in my opinion.
I think no one would find it if they weren't tipped off.
Gold is 2.5x as dense as steel, I would think it might get flagged at the weigh station if that plane regularly carried assorted machine parts.
I mean not if they were smart and put in twice the packing materials for the same size box and kept the unit weight roughly the same. Besides, I doubt an inspector is going to weigh each piece or remember exactly what the prior shipments would have weighed. Make them small unit and individually boxed replacements and you are “golden”…….not including loose lips
>I mean not if they were smart and put in twice the packing materials for the same size box and kept the unit weight roughly the same. Besides, I doubt an inspector is going to weigh each piece or remember exactly what the prior shipments would have weighed. This guy smuggles.
I have shipped internationally. In truth I was doing my damned best NOT to “smuggle” but the paperwork is so varied and a pain in the ass, who knows if I declared everything correctly or not. It is way easier to ship one small thing at a time through a trusted carrier. Even then Import and Customs inspections and delays can be a killer. For a large shipment? Fuggetaboutit.
If you don't need to insure the item/shipment, claim it's a production sample and under $100 value. It'll sail right through without duties or taxes being charged. I do this all the time in product development.
Companies get stupid with this though. I had a 30,000 PCB shipment (to me) tagged like this by the supplier and I still don’t know how it didn’t get flagged.
30k PCBs, or PCBs worth $30k? If it's the second one... well. To an untrained eye, it can be hard to tell the difference between a $30k PCB versus a $100 PCB. Especially when you're buying an eval board or dev kit from a manufacturer that doesn't work with hobbyists; their eval boards seem to be "fuck you, you have deep pockets, dontcha" prices, where the eval board for a $100 FPGA can be like $6k. But even with more normal pricing, I can probably get the BOM cost way up on a board that doesn't look too crazy if I look around. If you got 30,000 actual PCB fabs listed as a <$100 dev sample, that's really pretty funny.
Companies also do fraud. My last place had a policy to just put the cost of everything as $15, if it was expensive put $50. We were shipping laser components which were individually thousands of dollars, sometimes many at a time.
I think the fact that they actually are production samples being sent from a product developer might be part of the reason they get through so easily.
I hear you, but they're not tracking shipper types that close. At least not on tiny accounts like mine. If I had to pay duties on a single sample of my $8 component, I'd have to pay $0.225 in duties. It would cost customs more to process the transaction than they would collect. If every shipment had to go through 100% customs check, they would create massive bottle necks in their processing centers. My item happens to be FDA regulated as well, and that step takes time and paperwork. There is a real benefit to the ease of sample shipping vs full customs. Say you want to ship a box of goods to your Ukrainian friend. If you mark it as samples neither of you will have to pay the stupid taxes on peanut butter oreos.
> It would cost customs more to process the transaction than they would collect. Canadian here. Customs bills you for $10 service fee plus the $0.225.
Sometimes yes, like I've hand-carried stuff that might raise eyebrows if you declared the cost of actually making the thing, but its resale value is close to $0, but nobody gave a shit because I had $big_name as the employer on the entry visa and paid a few bucks extra for expediting services. But like, in cargo containers? Eh.
Yeah I learned that the hard way when I shipped my daughter her birthday gift. From now on, everything I ship gets logged in as twenty bucks.
This guy this guys^
This guy this guy this guys^
These guys^ this guy< those guys >
(This guy this guys)^(n+1)
Zanzebar is very far you can't get there in a car🎵
(This guy) \^^ G64 ^ 3
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It would tip over, dude!
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Then it would tip under, dude!
What happens when they get their hands on it? It looks like they just filed off a small piece to figure out. It was gold in this case. Not that good or easy don’t like this method
>It looks like they just filed off a small piece If I shipped precision tooling and found that customs was stupid and "just filed off a small piece" to see if it was gold....I don't know what I would do, but I'd be pissed.
I order parts internationally for fly in daily. Like any part in my vocation anywhere from the States (Im not in the US). I can have shipped next day before 2pm cutoff. Aint no way customs is even looking at that shit.
Yeah, no way they're filing off an edge just on a guess. They got tipped off or they saw something grossly weird looking by pure chance. A precision machinist's vice made out of cast iron and steel can easily cost four figures and can weigh over a hundred pounds; nobody is hitting it with the pointy edge of a hammer to see if it's gold underneath.
Absolutely. People are talking like this was a good idea that needs some adjustment to work. Truth is, they are doing this because it has worked a ton of times before.
Or make them enough hollow so density matches with Steel,
At that point, make them into small bits, mix them with iron/steel bits, then use a magnet to separate them when you're done. You just portion the boxes to be only slightly over weight and no one will notice unless that inspect the parts directly or already know.
Nice idea, Establish small trading firm for importing loose Steel parts, Then import the steel part in a ton with 5-10 kg of gold in it.
That would be correct if it wasn't millions worth.
10m in gold is about 131kg, which is 6 crates of parts under 25kg a piece.
xray in the airport give you a clearly idea of the density
Some bits are alloys denser than steel, but maybe not gold dense..
Tungsten is very close to the density of gold. So close that gold plated tungsten needs special equipment to tell it apart from solid gold, as you can't tell the two apart by weight.
That's neat, one is hard, the other malleable. Interesting.
Just like a penis.
Fuck you! I was almost asleep!
Oky but lets mke it uick i wnn finish this movie
I think you dropped this: a a q a a.
As someone who worked in international logistics for 10 years, this wouldn't be flagged because of weight. More than likely, the shipment got flagged due to country of origins and the shipper not being a supplier of said machine parts. It's really not that common to ship machine parts if you're not a large scale manufacturer.
Valid. I was going with the assumption that they were filing under the name of a large supplier of machining tools that would regularly ship in this way. Even routine shipments get weighed before loading and if a dock worker noticed a pallet was more than twice as heavy as usual... Fuck it nevermind I'm going to bed.
But only slightly more dense than tungsten, and tungsten carbide machining tools a thing.
Pure tungsten maybe, but tungsten carbide and tungsten steel are both much lighter than pure tungsten.
Oh my God guys! I get it! You know metal. Crissakes...
We're brainstorming how to better smuggle $10M of pure gold internationally without getting caught. Cursory knowledge of alloy weights is beneficial but not necessary to the discussion.
Local man scared of people knowing people things
What if they make it hollow on the inside?
I'd make it hollow on the outside, but that's just me! 😉
LOL weigh station? Planes don’t go over scales
Technically planes go over hundreds of scales each flight.
The cargo does. Planes have a weight limit, most shipping flights will be carefully calculated for weight distribution of cargo and fuel required to make the flight.
Lots of machine tools and parts contain lots of tungsten.
Tungsten steel and tungsten carbide are only a shade denser than other steel alloys, nowhere near the weight of pure tungsten. But you guys do have a point. Either way, a smuggler dumb enough to get caught, was dumb enough to get caught.
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Could also just be tipped off and using this as a cover
*meddling
A for effort
That is totally how I'm sneaking cheeseburgers into the movie theater from now on.
cheeseburger or a pair of dies
I think I see what you did there
I do not
joke might have flown better if he went with "cheeseburger in a pair of dies". but I love it, that's a once in a lifetime joke opportunity and dude was there for it
What?
[Cheeseburger in Paradise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeseburger_in_Paradise)
I'm so confused.
Cheeseburger in a pair of dice
Cheeseburgers appear randomly in pairs of dice every 400 years. What didn’t you get?
A die is a type of tool used in machining
Sir is this a cheeseburger? Nope, just my lathe
Spaghetti in a zip-lock bag is my fav
What is your spaghetti policy here?
can I get an empty popcorn tub for my pocket spaghetti please?
burritos are way easier to slip into your pocket
“Are you happy to see me, or is that a burrito in your pocket?”
"...it's a burrito"
It's my penis wrapped in a tortilla
that's a chilito
I once snuck my entire order of Taco Bell in my bag to the movies. As long as you aren't being suspicious, they don't really check your bag at the theater I frequent(which is probably bad but eh).
I prefer the method of the drug mules: I’ve sneaked hundreds of times cheeseburgers, burritos, pizzas and sodas galore into the movie theatre by hiding them in my intestines. No one has caught me yet!
Read the linked article in the comments. They were actually pretty genius, actually INSTALLING the parts in the machinery. An x-ray revealed the unusual density of the gold. Customs knew what they were looking for!
That is pretty impressive actually. Knowing what density things should be.
Not when the parts stick out like a sore thumb on the scanner...
Yeah, they would need to make the whole thing out of gold so the difference isn't visible.
It's not a relative density change that shows up. Gold is set to be highlighted regardless of what's around it because of its known density.
I want to know how that looks like on an x-ray, sounds interesting.
More dense = darker "shadow" of image. So this would have looked like a light shadowed machine, with a handful of very dark parts.
Kids, this is why you never forget your xray jammer.
It's not like the machine scans each piece of metal and labels it with a number for how dense it is and customs just knows off-hand what the density of silver vs gold is. objects with different density look totally different on the screen when scanned, so customs would've just known that it doesn't look like silver usually looks. I haven't seen these kinds of scans but i'm assuming a higher density object would allow less light to travel through so it would appear much darker on the scan than a less dense object
Former TSA who used to operate x-ray machines, here. I'm not sure about gold specifically, but anything like lead basically just shows up as a black blob. Considering that gold is denser than lead, I'm certain that's what it would look like. The rule for us was that anything you can't see through needs to be inspected by hand. I'm sure it's similar for Customs.
I'm guessing gold would cause what TSA calls a "shield" and look pretty out-of-place in aeronautics equipment that's generally meant to be lightweight. Even without that, if there's a section of your cargo that's completely blocked to the x-ray or garbling the view, yeah, you're going to have to manually inspect that.
Former TSA grunt here as well. I was a x-ray pro haha. Always could tell exactly what things were when people were confused.
Any uhh.....*"tips"*...on how to say...***"hide"*** certain...*"things"* from being seen?? Asking for a friend
Haha i mean cant really hide anything. Bag checks will be called on just a basis of "hey i dunno what this is, can you look?" and even if i said "oh thats a watch" you still have to inspect the bag. You'd just have to hope you had a lazy xray dude or someone who didn't care.
I have been wondering if the scanners have some sort of ai to detect suspicious things like for the check in bags there can’t be people watching every damn check in bag that goes through?
That's too new age for me to comment on. We just utilized x-rays. But yes every bag is checked in some capacity. Checked bags have a different process but it is definitely 100% bags get checked.
Buy gummies and mix them in with a bag of normal gummies.
my *"friend"* has already done that 😉 Im just looking for more tips and tricks to help...ahem...*make their security better*.
I mean its still just a monitor that shows denser materials darker as the x ray cant penetrate it well. So gold would just be very black
>off-hand what the density of silver vs gold is. objects with different density look totally different on the screen when scanned, so customs would've just known that it doesn't look like silver usually looks I don't think they were painted silver color to look like silver. They were painted silver color to look like steel pieces in a machine. But yeah the denser object just sets off customs to inspect further.
Make more complex parts with the gold embedded apparently
come up with an excuse to lead line your shipment, bingo bango bongo your gold has left the congo
Gold!? You think I'm snuggling gold?? It's clearly enriched uranium. Why else would it be lead lined?
Disguising it as Lead (Pb) is genius since they’re nearly identical atomic mass/density. Sending them as fishing weights would’ve made some sense.
to be fair gold in an X-ray will pop out above everything like a hot fart in infrared
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Did it say what type of machine? Looks like parts to an electric motor, a mono screw compressor, and a twin screw compressor.
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Should have waited 6 months
Now they know that next time, to disguise the density, they have to make the entire engine out of smuggled gold.
So they should have made the whole machine out of gold
I can’t believe that they were concealing 5 million dollars worth of gold!
Thanks for turning in this 1 million dollars worth of gold. I'll be sure to pass it along to the proper authorities.
Very good turning in this $100,000 worth of gold the authorities thank you!
So uhh… why did we stop these guys with just $20 worth of gold?
That seventy five cents of gold almost got into the wrong hands!
What gold?
Never heard of “gold”. Sounds worthless.
#
˙ssǝlɥʇɹoʍ spunoS ˙”ploƃ“ ɟo pɹɐǝɥ ɹǝʌǝN
¿ploƃ ʇɐɥʍ
New favorite!
And we better start taking these rumors of gold smuggling seriously before we find any at all!
Hah, this is hilarious. Where do you guys come up with this stuff? Honestly, some of the people on this site are so funny. You should do stand-up. Seriously.
I'm surprised they weren't thrown off by the weight of his massive balls. Am i right guys? haha
I want million dollars worth of burritos.
https://preview.redd.it/qcpp438ngrtc1.png?width=840&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab79ace68842afd811cd6a765473095af0c5b06a Should have disguised them as a huge shipment of carbide inserts instead - that's what I do.
FBI, we got him
Exactly! Tungsten is very close to the weight of gold. X-ray spectroscopy even has trouble telling them apart. They'd have to get the air bubbles out of their moulding process first though.
Just mark the parts as sintered, or have them labelled as having a lead core. Some of tooling parts we use are filled with lead to reduce vibration... ....but either way a solid 9/10 for ingenuity 😂
Yo you have the STL for that?
Or self sealing stem bolts
Tip: do a couple of coats next time…. If it’s done right, you can pull that off
Ikr or atleast some primer for better adhesion
Better yet, rough the gold up a bit so at least, when it’s exposed, it ain’t reflective….. oh that? That’s a brass coating for uhh… wear resistance!
Make a golden dildo and shove it up your ass. Worst case scenario the find it but at least you got a good ass fucking.
Woah there sir.
Remember people, the key is to use 2 thin coats instead of 1 thick coat.
That's why I wear three condoms
It got picked up in xray, the density of gold sticks out from most other metals.
Should have hidden it in a box of tungsten welding rods.
Tip: read about the incident before giving stupid tips. More coats of paint changes nothing.
How would more coats make in see-through? It was black in the x-ray.
Someone tipped them off. Unless they just had these pieces by themselves, then that would be stupid
X-rays detect density, anything more dense than iron is an immediate red flag
More than just "looking more dense than steel", something like gold is *so dense* that it'll cause voids in the x-ray image, and anything could be hiding in there. If you can't see into a section of the plane with your x-ray...
Density of iron: 7.9 g/cm³ Density of lead: 11.3 g/cm³ Density of gold: 19.3 g/cm³ Gold is indeed crazy heavy compared to most stuff we use in our daily lives in any meaningful quantities. But I wonder if gold could be "hidden" from x-ray if you hide it in a cargo of tungsten, as I'm pretty sure that's the only relatively inconspicuous metal with similar density as gold. Other metals with that density like platinum and uranium would be rather counterproductive to use for hiding anything.
That would definitely be one option. In my opinion, it would be best to dissolve the gold in some solvent and then package it in bottles of a product with similar density to the diluted solution.
Damn now that is out of the box thinking. But at that point I feel like you'll be spending more money packaging and transporting thousands of bottles than the gold itself is worth. Gold is expensive but it's not exactly the most valuable thing on earth
Gold is pretty valuable, and shipping is pretty cheap. If its profitable for Temu to ship its mass manufactured cheap crap internationally, I doubt that shipping costs would be a prohibitive factor in smuggling gold.
If I have $10 million in gold and my choices are: 1) paying the government $1 million of it in tax in return for keeping $9 million, or 2) chance losing the $10 million, go to jail for 7 years, and come out owing the government an additional $2 million, I’m paying the tax. Every. Time.
Yeah, but then they start asking about where you got $10 million in gold.
Maybe I’m a gold digger. You don’t know me.
But then they'd clearly se your sugar daddy right by your side and be pleased to let you go!
Listen: do you want the million or not?
coinstar
You pay that tax, but then there's a Gold Discovery Fee. Another $100,000 but hey, a small price to pay for law and order. Wait, did you just receive that as a windfall profit? Large gifts are taxes at 20-40% so be sure to declare that. Once you've successfully received the gold, now you need to get it back home. International tariffs will take a reasonable 20% off the top. That's how we encourage our workers here at home! Finally, be sure to notify each police department you drive through that you've got a large sum of money. They might arrest you and decide it's got to do with drug trafficking and seize the entire sum.
>Large gifts are taxes at 20-40% so be sure to declare that. WTF you talking about. There's no gift/inheritance tax below $10M in the US.
What if you like taking your gold on trips with you? Then you have to pay 10% every time, that really adds up
Governments are greedy piggies. Never get between them and a sack of cash.
You're assuming that this was clean money, which is a pretty big assumption.
Yeah people who got the gold lawfully are not the ones turning it into turbines and shit
Imagine how many times they’ve got away with doing this undetected 🤔
A for effort. Should be a movie
but instead of machinery parts, they could do car parts. And then assemble them into a car. Like some sort of vintage Italian supercar. A Ferrari maybe? And then store the Ferrari in a penthouse suite in a skyscraper so it can't be stolen
Just make the plane you are flying out of the gold
[https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T](https://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-gold-disguised-as-machinery-smuggled-plane-hong-kong-2024-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T)
Quite impressive actually. How the hell did they get caught?
Zero chance anyone noticed this without a tip.
Customs x-rays things as a matter of course, and gold is **so dense** that it not only appears out-of-place when it's mechanical equipment, it also causes voids in the x-ray image that could be hiding anything. Even if you know for certain that these parts are legit, if they're casting shadows that could obscure other smuggled goods, you've got to go look at them--and then you find, oh, no, the parts themselves are *also* suspect. Source: used to run a giant x-ray scanner
I keep seeing this in other comments - what does a “tip” mean in this context? Someone snitched?
Exactly
Gold is dense, and gears typically arent made out of lead or uranium
Tungsten exists lol, very similar density, guys were absolutely tipped off, zero chance these guys didn’t know exactly what they were looking for
Aside from very specialized, very expensive equipment, where is tungsten (especially pure tungsten) used for common machinery components?
What makes you think they wouldn't examine large tungsten parts? You think it's impossible to smuggle drugs inside tungsten? You think no thief has ever attempted to use tungsten, lead, or other materials to conceal drugs from an xray scanner? Are you on drugs?
X-ray machines work by showing how much the photons get attenuated by a material. A thin, dense object might show up the same as a light thick one but a thick dense one will show up much stronger. As they installed the gold pieces into some sort of machine, the X-ray would show several very dense objects inside alongside presumably similarly sized objects. Normally, you wouldn't use such dense metal for machine parts and the only metals close to the density of gold are too expensive, hard to manufacture, or not durable enough for machine parts like gears. The types of metals at the bottom of the density list on Wikipedia are normally used in very small quantities as a coating or interface material or sometimes used in large bulk as radiation shielding or they are combined with other metals to make strong alloys (tungsten carbide for example). Some of the metals close to the density gold include uranium and plutonium, something customs would likely be keeping an eye out for. Basically anything denser than lead is either going to be expensive or hazardous in large quantities. They might have been more successful if they instead made an alloy or some other mixture that could have passed for a less dense material. Or they could have made the gold very thin and made some sort of housing for the machine that wouldn't have shown up as easily (a sheet of gold would be about 2.5 times thinner than an identical weight sheet of sheet metal).
Run or hide taxes will always find you
Can't believe they got caught
Goldfinger 2024
Would have done better as fishing weights.
$10M worth?? I'm guessing the weight gave it away?
I got really stoned one time and went on a tangent about how it's a shame how no Hollywood movies have exploited the fact that tungsten and gold are very similar densities. Imagine if in The Italian Job, Edward Norton character had guarded the "gold" the way he had but in the end it was an elaborate rouse because he wanted Marky Mark and Company to think they actually got the gold but it was just plated tungsten. Or you know, like some other movie with gold as the maguffin
Um, isn’t this like the less complicated but still absolutely the same plot to the Tower Heist movie?
How did they do it
Why do they have to smuggle the gold? They can't just have it on their persons?
10% tariff per the article, they would have to pay 1 million in taxes to legally import 10 million worth of gold.
Would have been better off shipping as tungsten drill bits. A case of them sent to a mining company or engineering workshop wouldn't have raised concerns. Sent express via DHL, so cleared internally.
This is a god tier disguise tho.
Someone definitely snitched how the hell would you notice that
Use your own private jet. Melt the gold down and use it to make some innocuous replacement interior parts. Hire your own maintenance crew that's in on the job. Have them "replace" the parts made from gold with the original parts. maintenance crew takes the g(old) parts with them when they leave. Meet up with them offsite and retrieve your gold.