Smugglers melted and spray painted $10 million in gold to look like machine parts
Smugglers melted and spray painted $10 million in gold to look like machine parts
The suspicious plane cargo was flagged by the Hong Kong authorities.
Go to all that work and then get found out by using shitty spray paint.
Now that's good. I wonder how they got caught.
...technicians removed the motor casing and found a rotor “wrapped in a cord wheel which was tied to tape.”
“It was not similar to a normal motor,” he added.
After examining the rotor, authorities found traces of glue at both ends of the machinery part. Using a hammer, they then tapped the part and “noticed unevenness,” indicating the metal was far more malleable than it should have been. Scraping away at an outer layer of silver paint showed flecks of gold.
Yeah somebody snitched. Airport security isn't going to disassemble an air compressor and start hitting things with a hammer.
You'd think the first clue would be that gold is 2.5x heavier by volume than steel and is 7x heavier than aluminum.
It would've been less suspicious to just have them laying around.
Reading the article, the paint was the last thing they tested after all of the other indicators. Not sure how a more expensive/higher quality of paint would have made any difference at that point.
They even put the parts back in the original air compressor. Hilarious.
This is the first time I hear about such a case. Imagine how many times it actually did work in the last decades. More effort and this would have gone through like the others.
I don't know if gold smuggling is actually a big thing. Compared to all the other stuff that's actually plentiful and smuggled a lot.
Yeah, customs doesn't inspect every single item going though. Wonder is they considered just labeling it as lead bar and spray painting, although that would rely on regular shipments of lead bar going from HK to JP and inspectors not looking too closely as lead bar shipments.
Isn't gold also heavy?
Probably don't notice when you're using a forklift.
My math says that's 133 kg of gold. Not all that much. If you replaced the metal volume, the additional weight is approx 81 kg.
Why did they not just electroplate it
Because gold weighs a ton due to its density, and they're idiots for thinking they could trick anyone weighing or x-raying the parts.
Fair, but that's an issue with the concept, not the execution. If they're going to go through all this effort to cast gold into machine parts, why would they use spraypaint?
Also I have no reference but I feel like if you plated this in tungsten you could get past customs. If they ask why its so heavy you could just say it needs to be heavy for a specific usecase so it's made of tungsten, though I admit I have no idea what tungsten plated gold would look like on an xray, or if tungsten electroplating is even possible.
They did a variant of Goldfinger's smuggling technique?
They should have tried not getting caught