Ever heard of cocaine being smuggled by stuffing it inside a candy bar? Believe it or not, such incidents have been the highlight of the international news. In today’s time finding American products in North Korean markets isn’t surprising at all. People have long used illegal routes to smuggle things around the world. Today this practice seems to be at an all-time high.
Smuggling is a business of exploitation bringing in billions each year. Smugglers transfer goods and people illegally from one country to another. The goods may vary from gold and silver to drugs and weapons. What are the most popular items on the global black market today? Don’t worry, we got you covered. Here are the top ten things in the world that are smuggled the most.
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10. Food
Expensive food items are often smuggled intensively. In North Korea, there is a black market where they sell Choco Pies for three or four times their original price, as in those round chocolate snacks filled with marshmallows in the center that come in red plastic wrappers.
9. DVDs
Video piracy is a huge market all over the world thus creating a big problem for the creative industry. China is one of the biggest producers of smuggled DVDs.
8. Cigarettes
This may make you chuckle thinking of how everything is “made in China”. Well, it is not that far behind when it comes to counterfeit things. This results in cheaper prices, no taxable income for the government, and poor and vulnerable people being the targets.
The quality of such counterfeit cigarettes is dodgy at best and giving competition to China in this department is Paraguay and Eastern Europe. Cigarettes are the most smuggled products in Canada.
7. Cellphones
Smuggling cell phones into prisons might sound weird but it has happened far too many times. There was a case in June 2013 where a cat was caught trying to smuggle mobile phones and chargers into a Russian prison. Justice has been served though, the cat was detained.
There are about 50,000 people living near the border, who cross the border between North Korea and China to trade and almost all of them have mobile phones, made in China of course and smuggled in. In most Indian jails, there have been frequent incidents of smuggling of cell phones behind bars.
6. Currencies
People are not legally allowed to carry currencies illegally, hence they get detained at airports. A case of a woman and her sixteen-year-old daughter getting caught on the Windsor- Detroit tunnel in America made headlines. They had $59,000 sewn-in pouches inside the linings of their bras.
5. Minerals
Smuggling of minerals like chromite, coal, gold, and iron and precious stones like lapis lazuli and emeralds in Afghanistan constitutes 20-25% of its foreign trade. People get good money by selling black stones covered in coltan ore in Venezuela to brokers. This coltan ore is used in microchips, smartphones, and as a powder in solar panels to increase efficiency.
But mining coltan ore in Venezuela, yes you guessed it, is illegal. Even women and children take part in this mining process. The drug smugglers mix this with other legitimate minerals and sell it to high-tech manufacturers. These people who mine the conflict minerals are poor and have no safety or job security; they simply do it for the good money they get.
4. Exotic Animals And Birds
Many bizarre stories are known about the smuggling of animals and birds.
In 2005, customs officials in Melbourne, Australia, stopped a woman who had arrived from Singapore after hearing mysterious “flipping” noises coming from around her waist. They found an apron under her skirt designed with pockets holding 15 plastic bags filled with water and 51 tropical fish.
There are several other instances of people getting caught trying to smuggle birds strapped to their legs, fishes in pouches made in aprons inside a long skirt. There are cases of baby leopards, pythons, tiger cubs, frogs, and monkeys in suitcases or just shipping the animals (like lizards, and butterflies) in hollowed-out books and cases. The net market value of animal smuggling is approximately $20 billion.
3. Drugs
There are many ways in which traders in narcotics indulge in drug smuggling. People have been found carrying drugs in their intestines. Also, cases of latex pouches covered in industrial sealants and aluminum foil have been found inside their bodies.
Last year Afghanistan secured the world’s number one position as the producer and supplier of illegal opium. Canada is the leading supplier of ecstasy pills to North America.
2. Weapons
The smuggling of arms and weapons is the root cause of terrorism in the world. Every year thousands of heavy machine guns, hand-held under-barrel and mounted grenade launchers, portable anti-aircraft guns, portable anti-tank guns, recoilless rifles, and portable launchers of anti-aircraft missile systems are smuggled from one country to another.
Internationally, it is a market of $60billion approximately per year. The infamous Purulia arms drop case during the Nineties in India was one in the series of arms running rackets flourishing in South and Southeast Asia.
1. Humans
Human smuggling is when a person by his own will wants to migrate from one country to another but does not have the legal right to do it, so he/she decides to smuggle himself. Such people get helped by smugglers who are paid hefty amounts.
This smuggling is different from human trafficking as it involves the consent of the person. Many die while getting smuggled due to suffocation in the suitcase, or they get lost on their way. A few years back, in 2001 a 135lb woman was found iunder the dashboard of a car near the US-Mexico border.
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