Chinese customs seize thousands of AMD Radeon graphics cards

Thousands of AMD Radeon graphics cards from the manufacturer XFX have been confiscated by the Chinese customs. The reason: The packages were labeled with fake stickers, where the model designations were pasted over in order to evade taxes.

Chinese customs seize XFX graphics cards

Chinese customs authorities have seized 5840 AMD Radeon models manufactured by XFX at the port in Huanggang, authorities announced on the social network weibo. The packages were equipped with stickers including wrong model designations and the papers were also filled out incorrectly.

Apparently, they tried to pass off the high-end graphics cards as cheaper products in order to save taxes. The value of goods is said to be 20 million yuan, which is equivalent to almost three million euros. Converted, this comes to just under 500 euros per graphics card.

According to pictures, it could be the models XFX Speedster SWFT 309 Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6600 XT, RX 6800, RX 6800 XT or RX 6900 XT. It is unclear whether the manufacturer, headquartered in Ontario, USA, knew about the case. The official Chinese website and its own presence on the Chinese Tmall marketplace were unavailable for quite some time after the discovery.

Sale to mining farms?

For quite some time, there has been speculation that graphics card manufacturers sell large quantities of their hardware directly to mining farms in order to make money in GPU mining, for example with the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

As the website MyDrivers reports, there are rumors of around 150,000 misdeclared GPUs being shipped directly to mining farms or to PC gamers after being used in cryptomining. In the style of classic bulk goods, the latest finds of XFX graphics cards with Radeon chip were also only wrapped in bubble wrap, the original box was not included.