With heavily annotated sales circulars for navigation, my mom used to spend every Saturday driving all over town to get the very best prices on at least five different kinds of meats. So when I hear about smugglers using a zip line to move iPads and iPhones to Hong Kong from mainland China to avoid paying taxes, I'm pretty pretty sure I know how these guys think.
Using a crossbow, smugglers shot a fishing line from a 21-story building in Sha Tau Kok, 300 meters across the Sha Tau Kok river to a small rural house in Hong Kong, Gizchina reports. The whole idea was to sell the illegal imports in Hong Kong for a profit by avoiding mainland taxes.
The smugglers worked in the wee hours, hoisting black nylon bags stuffed with iPhone 4s and iPad 2s, and wheeling them into Hong Kong via a pulley system made out of what looks like a giant bike wheel.
(Yes, I know it would be a whole lot cooler if the smugglers actually traveled on the zip line themselves, but still... crossbow! Who knows how much money my mom would've avoided spending on meats had she been armed with a crossbow!)
The smugglers were foiled when customs officers discovered the zip line, arresting six smugglers and confiscating $46,600 worth of iContraband.
More on the annoying way we live now:
- Google self-driving car crash caused by human
- Pentagon will pay you to be an 'Internet meme tracker'
- Dating site thinks it knows better than you
Helen A.S. Popkin will take even the happiest story and make it about dystopia. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+.