Woman Tries to Smuggle Chips, iPhones Into China Using Pregnancy Prosthetic

A woman has been detained in China after it was discovered she was wearing a pregnancy prosthetic packed with Intel processors and smartphones.

As The Register reports(Opens in a new window), the woman was attempting to pass through Gongpei Port’s customs checkpoint in China. Customs officials became suspicious as the woman’s posture didn’t match how heavily pregnant she looked. An inspection machine was then used to discover the pregnancy was a fake.

The prosthetic being worn on her stomach contained a total of 202 Intel processors along with nine iPhones. It’s unclear which processor models or iPhone variants she was attempting to smuggle into Zhuhai, but no one will be surprised to hear she is now being detained.

As Bloomberg reports(Opens in a new window), when China suffered a shortage of chips back in 2020, it made smuggling processors into the country highly profitable. Clearly it still is, but the smugglers need to do a better job of acting the part if they intend to smuggle such a large quantity of chips on one person.

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Smuggling technology into China certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in March, a man taped 160 processors to his body and then attempted to pass through customs (he failed). A total of 5,840 graphics cards were also seized by Chinese customs in March after the labels had been covered up to hide their true value. Even as far back as 2017, a woman strapped 102 iPhones to her body and tried to pass through customs. She also failed.

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