I'm all for finding fresh use for ancient hardware, but not quite like this: this week, a 47-year-old man from Victoria, Australia, has been sentenced to nine years in prison after participating in a plot to smuggle cocaine into the country inside printers.
The scheme attempted to smuggle 22.4kg of cocaine inside a consignment of five printers. Australian Federal Police intercepted the shipment when it arrived in Melbourne back in 2017, discovering 10 bricks of the white stuff hidden within the printers' paper trays (if you've ever worked in an office, you know that's the last place anyone would ever look).
After testing the contents, the police replaced the cocaine with a substitute and then tracked the printers' journey all the way to a factory in Airport West, Victoria. Four men were ultimately arrested on the grounds of attempting to "possess a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug", per the AFP press release.
English (US)