The short answer? You get caught. A Hong Kong national residing in Melbourne was recently busted accepting four boxes of printer cartridges in the mail. The only thing more odd than buying ridiculously overpriced printer toner in bulk, is the fact that hidden in each cartridge was methamphetamine.
Having looked at the boxes while in customs, the Australian Federal Police conducted a fake delivery to the Melbourne woman of what was found to be 7kg of meth. The irony of storing expensive drugs in ridiculously expensive housing (when that housing isn’t necessarily dedicated to thwarting scents, etc) seems to have escaped the criminals. Luckily, no one plugged in the cartridges and had to wonder why they were only printing in “Heisenberg Blue”.
In fact, let’s have some fun with that. With some legwork done on how much toner actually weighs inside Canon cartridges, we can use that alongside the most generous retail price of those cartridges we could find locally. If the cops had seized 7kg of toner instead of meth, the “street value” would come in at about $7,333.
It pales in comparison to what the AFP would estimate the meth value at – seeing as they routinely place one kilogram at $1 million, that’d mean a $7 million haul – but that’s probably just chest puffing. Malaysian police estimate 1kg of meth at a far more down-to-earth $380,000, but even that seems high.
An investigation is still underway to find out where it all came from. All I know is, with the help of a smartphone, I’ve gotten those printer cartridges out of my system completely.
Toner… Not even once.
[Printer Cartridges] via Shutterstock