Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about a quarter of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts:
On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been “concealed in the integral parts” of the compressors. Those gold parts had also been painted silver to match the other components in an attempt to throw customs off the trail.
Anonymous • April 12, 2024 7:17 AM
Someone saw 007 Goldfinger…
Jon Jones • April 12, 2024 7:18 AM
Sounds like someone’s been watching too many James Bond films!
kiwano • April 12, 2024 8:28 AM
@Alan
X-ray assaying of precious metals has been a thing for quite a while already, and given that the current generation of airport luggage scanners basically run multi-wavelength cat scans, the only way I’d be expecting to get gold past a reasonably sophisticated customs agency is if they’re not looking all that carefully for it. (Even with a relatively unsophisticated customs agency, if I were trying to smuggle gold past them, I’d still plan around the relative lack of sophistication making it easier to ahem incentivise the customs officers processing me not to look all that carefully at my things.)
Emoya • April 12, 2024 8:30 AM
The best way to smuggle something is to “conceal” it in plain sight, disguised as something that naturally averts scrutiny (use your imagination). The harder the smuggler attempts to hide their goods, the more obvious the ruse.
Erdem Memisyazici • April 12, 2024 8:47 AM
A team of rappers. Experimental group called the Chingy-100. Just decked out with grills, chains, solid gold mixed with aluminium, purple suits. Book a music video shoot at your destination complete with a brochure and tell customs you are going to sweep the Internets by surprise and get a billion hits by next Tuesday. High profile through the airport for promotional reasons. Could anyone stop you? 😄
Winston Smith • April 12, 2024 9:08 AM
While X-ray diffraction (“XRD”) and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (“XRF”) can differentiate between metals I doubt these technologies were used on a cargo plane. I think it is more likely that the technology used was a good old-fashioned informer and the talk of X-rays is just cop bullshit to 1) convince smugglers that they will be caught; and 2) to provide cover for the informant.
jelo 117 • April 12, 2024 9:15 AM
A simpler form of a key plot element in the film Tower Heist
Troy Ounce • April 12, 2024 11:06 AM
… What exactly is the despicable “Crime” here — who is the victim ??
noname • April 12, 2024 11:20 AM
@Troy Ounce
… who is the victim
Japan. The smuggler was trying to avoid Japan’s 10% import tariff. To the tune of $1 million.
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 12:15 PM
@ Anonymous, Jon Jones,
(Sorry due to auto-mod I’ve had to split this post into parts)
Part 1,
“Someone saw 007 Goldfinger…”
You beat me to it…
But… I’m an acknowledged old creaky who saw the film when it was still only on celluloid 😉
You are I assume some what younger?
So what’s your excuse for watching a “spy thriller” with “booz, blonds, babes and arch villains?” Oh and the occasional shot of some thoroughbred fillies being ridden[1]…
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 12:17 PM
@ Anonymous, Jon Jones,
Part 2,
It is of course the famous film for introducing the ultimate car accessory of an ejector seat for the front passenger, and if memory serves also rotating number plates[2].
So @Bruce, just proves that movie plots do make it into the real security world 🙂
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 12:21 PM
@ Alan, kiwano,
Part 3,
But getting back to a valid point the smugglers must have used a non tungsten system.
A decade or so ago I joked about “Gold Brick” on this blog due to,
‘ht tps://silver doctors.blog spot.com/2012/03/tungsten-filled-1-kilo-gold-bar.html
It turned out that something like one third of the gold repositories around the world could have been “contaminated” by the fake gold ingots. Basically they were gold bars “padded out” with rods of mixed metals to make an alloy not just of the same mass but density of gold around which was actual gold.
Back then X-Raying was a “standard test” used before gold ingots were accepted in repositories… As it was the only “non surface only” test that was “non destructive”.
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 12:24 PM
@ Alan, kiwano
Part 4,
So yes the idea worked back then. These days repositories also use a form of “baby scan” ultra sound system that spots the boundaries by acoustic velocity factor. Because X-Ray is not sufficient.
Can this ultrasound be beaten, I’ve not tried so I don’t know for certain. But I do know from other metal alloys “feathering” gets past quite a few “radiated/conducted” energy tests.
[1] A chunk of the film was filmed on a horse racing ranch which was supposedly Goldfingers lair.
[2] But it was also the film that gave both me and my son the fine appreciation of Aston Martin cars and other famous UK cars such as the AC Cobra. Which was manufactured almost at the back of my flat in Thames Ditton in Surrey just south of “Royal Hampton Court” a number of decades ago…
Tony • April 12, 2024 1:16 PM
Older film that also smuggled disguised gold “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951)
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 2:12 PM
@ Tony
“Older film that also smuggled disguised gold “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951)”
Back long before the “Sir ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Guinness” title was minted 😉
He was young… And it was the film he got his first Academy Award nomination.
Just a handful of years earlier he was taking part in “Operation Husky” –invasion of Sicily– that was the reason for the now more famous espionage deception “Operation Mincemeat”.
Later in 1957 he won an Oscar for his role in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”, that for many years there after people whistled the theme tune to,
Jon (a different Jon) • April 12, 2024 3:01 PM
@ Clive Robinson
With all due respect, the AC Cobra was a perfectly decent but otherwise ordinary little British sports car until Carroll Shelby stuffed a great thumping US V8 motor in its nose. 😉
The 289 wasn’t bad – but the 427 was awesome.
J.
lurker • April 12, 2024 3:05 PM
[Customs officials] discovered the gold on a cargo plane scheduled to leave for Japan,
These machines were going by airplane. They would be weighed as cargo, Some bright loading clerk must have thougt, “Hang on, a compressor isn’t usually that heavy.”
Steve • April 12, 2024 3:31 PM
@Clive Robinson: Re Goldfinger.
Heck, I read the book in hardback.
It contains my favorite line (and words to live by):
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
I don’t think it made the movie script but I could be mistaken.
vas pup • April 12, 2024 4:50 PM
@Winston Smith point “I doubt these technologies were used on a cargo plane. I think it is more likely that the technology used was a good old-fashioned informer and the talk of X-rays is just cop bullshit to 1) convince smugglers that they will be caught; and 2) to provide cover for the informant.” highly probable close to the truth.
@lurker point “They would be weighed as cargo, Some bright loading clerk must have thought, “Hang on, a compressor isn’t usually that heavy.” could be reasonable if loading clerk is really interested to do the job not exactly within scope of his duty.
lurker • April 12, 2024 4:54 PM
We think we know where this gold was intended to go, but where did it come from? Analysis of a recent gamma ray burst suggests it might not have come from a supernova.
‘https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68787534
William • April 12, 2024 4:55 PM
I like the story about the guy who rode his bike across the border every day eventually raising the suspicion of one of the guards. This resulted in him being frequently detained, questioned, and searched.
The guard became obsessed searching the seams of his clothes, the soles of his shoes, and often completely disassembling the poor fellow’s bicycle. The gnawing suspicion drove the guard over the edge and he grew ragged with exhaustion as his obsession saw him spending countless hours surveilling the suspect.
It got the best of him and he was eventually encouraged to take early retirement. And that was that until the two met years later at a small tavern half way across the world when both happened to be on vacation at a small Caribbean island.
To show he had no hard feelings, the former guard bought the cyclist a beer. It led to a each buying a few rounds and a few more. The guard started to realize the cyclist was a good guy and began feeling bad for his suspicions and offered his sincerest apologies realizing his intuitions were wrong.
The cyclist, starry eyed with that elixir of truth accepted the apology but also confessed the guard was right.
“What!?” protested the guard, “there’s no way you were smuggling anything! I would have caught you! What were you smuggling that I couldn’t find?!”
“Bicycles.”
Clive Robinson • April 12, 2024 5:04 PM
@ Steve,
Re : Age has value…
“Heck, I read the book in hardback.”
I hope you kept it with it’s dust jacket?
Because it’s probably worth the price of a new family car…
As some know I have a “dead tree cave” that has thousands of books.
Some engineering books to my shock having spent only ~$35USD and kept them in good almost pristine condition are now worth well north of ten times the price.
I also have some of my fathers books including a first edition of a Damon Runyon’s “Furthermore” that I must have first read back in the 1960’s
Well some think it’s worth “silly money”
https://www.abaa.org/book/547027590
Me I still think of it as a fun read with boyhood memories. In it is the story “Butch Minds the Baby” it’s nearly a hundred years old, but is a tale of “social engineering” that is still applicable to security folks today.
The problem with the cave is it has considerable weight in now unavailable books most are I would have thought of at best limited interest but others… I’ve one on early factory electrical installations it’s fascinating to me just looking at the diagrams likewise one on boiler explosions and what should be done to prevent them. Both are more than a century old technology wise and I had thought nobody would be interested in them… But people are offering good money to have them scanned in high quality…
Matija • April 13, 2024 11:42 AM
It’s quite an old techniques. Yugoslavs used it to smuggle gold from Turkey and other and Middle East. They made a mechanical tool shapeed object, galvanized it to obtai proper chromium look and stored it into tool box on a truck. In 70′ and 80′ there were no x-ray devices on borders.
Steve • April 13, 2024 7:31 PM
@Clive Robinson: Sadly, no, I no longer have the hardbound copy of “Goldfinger.” I think my father borrowed it from a friend at work and let me read it before he returned it.
So, no new car for me.
Givon Zirkind • April 13, 2024 9:04 PM
Sounds like something out of novel. Also, sounds like people are trying to bail on the CCP.
Clive Robinson • April 14, 2024 7:46 AM
@ Steve,
“So, no new car for me.”
Such is life…
Whilst things become rarer with time as entropy dictated, only some become of greater monetary value. The trick is knowing which things will “appreciate” the fastest (if at all).
A relative decided to by loads of “StarTrek” commemorative plates really inexpensively when it was “going out of fashion” and a shop had a closing down sale..
Then NextGen came and breathed life back into things… And so on.
They have several complete sets still in not just the original presentation boxes, but in the original shipping cartons to the retailer, and shipping notes etc.
You would be surprised how much value a cardboard box and packing note can increase the value…
Some cartons are even unopened so that makes the plates like “schroedinger’s cat” the value is in not knowing…
They have put them in their will to those who will be the “great grand children” to help pay towards “professional education”.
All I’ve got in the “crockery” department are some MuckyD’s coffee cups and cola-can glasses… No I did not “collect them” as such I just “shoved them in the cupboard” along with other free mugs and soup cups that were “promo”. After all they are there if ever I break something…
echo • April 15, 2024 2:50 PM
Never buy a pair of cheap earrings made out of “Chinese gold” not that I was expecting real gold given what I paid for them. It’s not gold and it rubs off. They’re not even nickle let alone palladium plated underneath they’re that cheap so they’re down to the copper. I don’t mind. I actually quite like them and wear them all the time.
Most gold earrings of any weight are hollow anyway. Nobody wants that much weight on their ears unless it’s for one off occasions and even then I wouldn’t wear them for more than a few hours. I have a stupidily huge pair of African style earrings which are really quite nice and all very coffee table lifestyle magazine. I’ve worn them about three times max.
Artisan crafted bespoke jewellery can easily put a few zeros on the cost to the point where they’re almost throwing the gold in for free. It would be valueless if stolen so the only value would be as scrap which is a waste in my mind. If it was any good and worn by a notable person so had a good provenance that might put another zero or two on the price.
Anything I wear would be lucky to wind up in the rummage box at a local charity shop.
Mike B • April 16, 2024 8:59 PM
@Clive Robinson, @Jon (a different Jon),
Oh, Clive, I envy you more for this than all the adventures and enigmas you’ve related here over years. The AC Ace was neato even with the original putt-putt box. Once Carroll Shelby gave it the 289, flares, race suspension, and race brakes, it was wondrous for the time. (I was just being born but I was raised in a racing family.) The 427 made it still more monstrous but more nose-heavy and harder to not wreck and DNF (SCCA “did not finish”).
Tyco made a very cool translucent plastic TycoPro electric slot car with the AC Cobra body. High collector value now. The company that owns the Auto World name makes a reproduction ThunderJet like the 1960s Aurora cars except an extra magnet on the bottom.
Celos • April 18, 2024 12:41 PM
Amateurs. While the camouflage is nice, nobody would ship very heavy low-value components like these via air. The cost of shipping is probably several times the value of the components. No surprise customs got suspicious.
Clive Robinson • April 18, 2024 1:17 PM
@ Celos, ALL,
“nobody would ship very heavy low-value components like these via air.”
Not true.
Even near worthless scrap gets sent by “air” for various reasons. The three primary ones are,
1, To avoid “land side costs”.
2, To avoid “long shipment times”.
3, To follow “Shipping safety regulations”.
A friend ships “zero value” warranty repairs for some or all of these reasons.
The problem is the likes of UPS who are greedy… They fraudulently add export/import costs on the customer side and pocket the money which can be hundreds of untaxed dollars. UPS when caught claim “administrative error” or some other bull. But when pushed they lied and the Tax people showed there was “no paperwork” further investigation found a lot more. UPS legal got “cute”, UPS sales lost large customer.
My friend found that DIY was not difficult and saved considerably, but rather than fly it out of the EU to the UK it’s quicker and less expensive to “Send a man with a van” to a “regional distributor” who does warranty testing / checking for him.
Jesse Thompson • April 22, 2024 3:19 PM
In my day, when we wanted to hide gold we’d just dissolve it into Aqua Regia.
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Alan • April 12, 2024 7:12 AM
I would think it would be easier to make gold look like plain old copper wiring. Like draw it into wire, lacquer it and wind it into motor cores or something.