On April 28th, Hong Kong Customs intercepted a private car suspected of smuggling. Upon inspection, the car was found to be carrying a peculiar load of 280 kilograms of live lobsters and 70 video cards.
The customs officials swiftly evaluated the worth of the lobsters and GPUs, which amounted to around 600K HK (equivalent to approximately 76K USD). To put it into perspective, the value of the graphics cards alone surpassed 67K USD based on the current market value of one kilogram of lobster, which is around 30 USD.
However, it seems unlikely that the smuggled GPUs were of much value, considering that they were based on the NVIDIA Quadro K2200 series using the Maxwell architecture, which is almost a decade old. Currently, these GPUs can be purchased for as little as $160, which is not a significant amount. It’s unclear why the smugglers would go through such lengths to transport these outdated GPUs. Moreover, even cryptominers may not find these GPUs worthwhile since they only come with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
It is not uncommon for computer components to be discovered as unregistered items in cargo. In recent years, there have been instances of 84 solid-state drives (SSDs) found concealed in an electric scooter, and even a single individual who tried to smuggle 160 processors strapped to his body. Nevertheless, this latest incident may just be the most inventive idea to date.
Via Tom’s Hardware