Do drug smugglers use UPS or Fedex? Is there anything in these systems to prevent it?
I heard a few years ago that they use FedEx. From what I was told, FedEx doesn’t inspect/open packages. The person I heard this from is a flower wholesaler who get’s flowers shipped in from Holland on a regular basis and apparently this is why they use FedEx.
Interestingly enough UPS seemed REALLY anal when I tried to ship to ship a laptop to someone when I auctioned it on eBay. As soon as they saw I declared it as a laptop on the shipment info sheet they ripped it open and said they wouldn’t ship it unless it had styrofoam around it; either the original packaging or I’d have to go to Home Depot and buy some. My extreme-bubblewrap job wouldn’t suffice even though I didn’t see any problem with it.
Valuable life lesson learned: lie on what you’re shipping.
It sounds as though this happened at a UPS store? I’ve never been to one, but I hear they’re extreme in packaging things. I work in a hub and let me tell you, if you saw the inside of a hub, you would understand why. There’s nothing about drugs in this. No one, I mean absolutely no one, even looks at the packages they’re throwin–er, handling, if they don’t need to, let alone look at invoices.
I can give personal insight on this- I have worked in several departments at Fedex in the past. Basically, if your shipment is domestic (US address to US address), Fedex has no system in place to search or inspect packages. International packages, however, are under the jurisdiction of US Customs, and they can and do inspect packages as they see fit. They bring the drug dog out a couple of times a week to spot sniff packages being unloaded, and definitely do catch drugs concealed in a variety of ways- in cans of coffee, liquified to look like beverages, anything you can think of. They also scan the manifests (basic info on every package Fedex handles is relayed to Customs) and Customs is pretty good at being able to tell which shipments raise a red flag, and inspects those by hand. Believe me, a package of pottery from Colombia will be inspected in a heartbeat- I once saw them nab a package of pottery that somehow had cocaine intermingled into the pottery iteself. Which is also why you don’t want to order anything like legitiamate pottery from somewhere like Colombia, it will probablyget smashed up in a search, and I think you are SOL if you don’t have insurance on it.
But… they handle millions of packages. The drug dog does not work all day, every day. Something labeled as a computer from IBM Taiwan to Joe Blow could very well be a kilo of hash, so if the dog is sick that night, the shipper or recpient doesn’t raise a red flag, and it is not pulled for a random check, then yeah, you can get drugs through.