Gold smuggled in the formof credit and debit cards

Women and families returning home are used as carriers

Gold is now smuggled into Kerala in the form of credit and debit cards sans the magnetic stripe, according to Customs Department investigators.

The bullion strips are often concealed in wallets and hand-baggage, making detection difficult. They could also be coated with substances to fox airport scanners.

Aneish. P. Rajan, Joint Commissioner of Customs, told

The Hindu on the sidelines of a conference here on Wednesday that the novel method was perhaps the latest example of how carriers used the “product form” of everyday objects to smuggle gold into Kerala.

Locating gold smugglers among passengers in the crowded environment of an international airport exit was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

The Customs Department was skeletally staffed. Just 28 enforcers in the Cochin international airport process about 50 lakh passengers and 23,000 flights annually. Their strength fell far short of the mandatory deployment of at least 144 check-post enforcers in an airport that handled more than 10 lakh passengers a year.

The Customs would feel the shortage of personnel more with the commissioning of the Kannur airport. The Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi airport customs also operated with less than 30 enforcers.

Despite the handicap, the Customs had seized gold worth ₹163 crore in 2017. It registered 604 cases and arrested an almost equal number of couriers. The cases detected so far were just the tip of the iceberg. The “failure-to-detect” rate was unquantifiable. But it could be high, another investigator said.

Kerala has a big market for gold. Smuggling bullion into the State had turned appealingly lucrative after the Union government hiked the import duty on gold to tackle the country’s yawning current account deficit in 2014.

Smugglers often drafted women and families returning home as carriers in return for free tickets and much compensation. Such “carriers” noticeably differed from the established profile of smugglers and, hence, were difficult to detect.

Gold was smuggled mainly in body cavities. Consumer durables such as hotplates, pens, emergency lamps, mobile phones, toys and washing machines were commonly used to conceal bullion. The resurgence of gold smuggling has triggered a corresponding dip in legal gold bullion import.