Smuggler Tries Importing Unidentified Spiders
Smuggler Tries Importing Unidentified Spiders
You may have already heard about those rare occasions when excited consumers open up their new play stations only to find dead spiders inside of the console. A recent incident at a Mexican airport tells a similar story, only this time the spiders were physically placed within video-game cartridges. Customs officials found seventy three spiders stuffed into bootlegged video-game cartridges.
The seventy three spiders were found in ten Famicom game cartridges, and they were destined for an address in Baltimore. The species that the spiders belong to is currently unknown, which may indicate that these spiders were being smuggled as valuable specimens that a wealthy collector would find interesting.
The spiders were intercepted by Mexican customs officials at the Guadalajara International Airport. The package was “creepy” looking, so the authorities opened the suspicious package and found more than seventy spiders scuttling about within thin plastic tubes. These tubes were hidden within the video-game cartridges, which were bootlegged, so somebody was breaking a lot of laws here.
When moving animals across international borders the proper documentation describing the animals must be presented to authorities. Failure to properly document animals while crossing into another country is a serious offense since disease or even full blown epidemics could occur as a result of animal-borne disease.
In a similar case from a few years ago, a German man spent six months in jail for smuggling over one hundred tarantulas into the United States by mail. Also, cockroaches have been known to appear within people’s video-game consoles without explanation. These situations are rare and are due to storage areas that are highly populated with spiders.
No suspecs in this recent crime have been reported yet, but it is likely that someone living in Baltimore will be getting a court summons soon.
Have you ever found a spider, or several, within a product that you purchased?
