International auction house Sotheby’s has cancelled an upcoming sale of rhino horn artefacts in Hong Kong and joined other companies like Bonhams in saying they will no longer list any goods containing rhino horn for sale regardless of its origin, Agence France-Presse reported on Saturday. Read More >>
British police investigating a drone being flown near a prison pursued a woman in a vehicle who eventually crashed and died, according to a report inThe Guardian. Read More >>
US border agents near Nogales, Arizona, were busy last weekend. In five busts, they confiscated a buffet of hard drugs inbound from Mexico. The haul is valued at a combined $928,000 (£631k). The best part of the whole thing was this pair of meth burritos. Read More >>
Remember that scene in Traffic where they mould cocaine into dolls? This kind of trickery happens in real life, too. A band of international smugglers recently got caught with over $370/£244 million worth of cocaine disguised as 40 shipping pallets. No, the pallets weren’t filled with cocaine. The pallets were cocaine. Read More >>
We’ve heard report after report about Islamic State looting and destroying ancient archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria. But across the Mediterranean, the looting of antiquities is also posing a problem in economically strained Greece. Read More >>
This is crazy. An eight-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast was being smuggled into Spain while being hidden inside a suitcase. Apparently, the boy’s father had paid a 19-year-old girl to carry the boy in the luggage from Morocco to neighbouring Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa. This was a bad plan that could have ended horribly for everyone. Read More >>
When customs officers at Futian Port in China saw a male passenger with "weird walking posture, joint stiffness, muscle tension" they got suspicious. Turns out, he was attempting to smuggle 94 iPhones into the country, all of them strapped to his body. Read More >>
China has long been home to a booming illicit "trade" for new iPhones smuggled into the country through ports like Hong Kong or Shanghai. And the iPhone 6 is no exception: customs officials have reported that hundreds of 6 and 6 Plus devices have been confiscated this month. Read More >>
Big ports have always struggled to keep an eye on every single ship that passes through their waters—especially the part of the boat that's underwater. Now, there's a new sort of robotic barnacle that can stealthily slide along the hulls of incoming ships and scan for hidden compartments where smugglers hide their loot. And it's only the size of a football. Read More >>
Last week at the Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok authorities arrested a Thai man after discovering 54 Ploughshare Tortoises in a suitcase he retrieved from a luggage carousel. That's a lot of tortoises, particularly when you consider that the Ploughshare is one of the rarest species on the planet, numbering just 400 around the world. Read More >>
A woman has been arrested by airport police carrying almost three pounds of cocaine in her breasts. Not in her bra, no—inside her breasts. You can see the cocaine implants in this image. They are 1.5 pounds each. Read More >>
If you think the mobile phone explosion of recent years has somehow been kept at bay by prison walls, you would be greatly mistaken. Technology, like water, permeates every crack. Today on Lockdown, we're talking phones in jail. Read More >>