In regional ports all around the world, smuggling has become a rampant practice brought on by greater levels of sophistication by organized crime syndicates. It is due to this that new strategies need to be implemented by customs officials in order to prevent smuggled goods from entering into the country.
Check the Weight of the Container
One of the main methods that smugglers use in ports in order to get a container through customs is to intentionally mislabel it with relatively benign products. For instance, a container’s shipment can be indicated as being nothing more than plastic spoons and forks when in reality it contains several hundred illegal chemicals. In order to add another level of misdirection, smugglers also tend to place several boxes on the front half of the shipping container that contain the items that the product manifest says is inside. The smuggled items are usually located at the back away from prying eyes so that they can pass through customs easily. Considering the fact that regional ports around the world go through thousands of containers a day, it is not surprising that a lot of smuggled items get through. It is due to this that it is highly recommended that customs officials utilize compression load cells on the containers to detect anomalies. Compression load cells act as industrial scale methods of measuring the weight of large objects and, as such, can be an effective method of catching smugglers in the act. By weighing the container, customs officials can easily determine if the weight of the products inside matches what is written on the manifest.
Purge Corrupt Officials
Another way in which criminal syndicates are able to smuggle goods into the country is bribing customs officials at the port of entry. All that would be needed is for the customs official in question to declare that a particular container has already been inspected with the end result being that it is released that much quicker with no one realizing it is full of smuggled goods. In order to prevent this from happening, it is highly recommended that governments perform lifestyle checks on employees in their customs department in order to determine if someone has a lifestyle that is not applicable to their current pay grade.
All and all, governments and customs departments need to be vigilant when it comes to the containers that are entering into their ports. Smugglers are getting increasingly more sophisticated in the ways that they smuggle products into the country and, as such, more sophisticated methods need to be developed to catch them in the act.
