Chinese customs officials have uncovered someone trying to smuggle SSDs inside an e-scooter, and I know you're thinking that there's no room for anything in the compact frame of an e-scooter, and you'd be wrong. But you'd be wrong. The smugglers thought they could cross the border and get home with such an idea. Unfortunately, they did not.

Qingdao Customs seized a scooter with 84 M.2 SSDs stored in the upright between the handlebars and front wheel of the scooter in an attempt to circumvent Chinese import duties and regulations in the Zhuhai Macau Cross-Border Industrial Zone (via WCCFTech (opens in new tab)). The scooters were discovered as they were being put through an x-ray scanner.

"On March 3, at approximately 13:00, a passenger from the mainland pushed a motorized scooter through a 'non-declared channel' at a special port in the cross-border industrial zone," the release (opens in new tab) states. "When the motorized scooter was put through a machine for inspection, images from the machine as it passed showed a huge unknown object on the front bumper of the motorized scooter.

"After dismantling the front bumper, 84 Kingston brand solid state drives hidden in the axle tubes were seized and the case was further processed according to regulations."

In fact, you can see footage of what appears to be a smuggler attempting to get the SSD through customs before being caught red-handed; the SSD is removed from the scooter right in front of them.

The drive is made by Kingston, but due to the quality of the image it is difficult to identify the exact model.

The Zhuhai region of China surrounds Macau, a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. Zhuhai is adjacent to Hong Kong, another major trade hub, via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. In fact, in Zhuhai, customs officials found a smuggler who was trying to bring in 200 CPUs (opens in new tab) stuffed under prosthetic legs, falsely claiming to be pregnant.

Chinese customs has found all sorts of hardware smuggled in in strange ways. Last year, a man attempted to enter the country walking with 160 CPUs taped to his body (opens in new tab), but was arrested for his unusual walk. You would think that would be the first thing to master before attempting to smuggle goods. In another case, $3 million worth of AMD GPUs (opens in new tab) were attempted to be brought into the country, but instead of strapping 5,840 GPUs to the poor guy, they simply mislabeled the boxes they were sent in.