Gangs mail drugs to students
CHINESE gangsters are flooding the Australian postal system with record quantities of drugs including cocaine and ice, addressed in parcels to students as young as 17.
Officers are seizing an unprecedented 200 contraband parcels a day from the 120 million mail items arriving at Australian Border Force processing facility in Clyde, western Sydney, where a record 44 per cent of parcels are now being checked with x-ray machines or sniffer dogs.
The boom in online shopping has created a spiralling volume of parcels arriving from overseas, adding to the pressure on Border Force.
The scheme – where students are recruited by organised crime syndicates to be receivers of the parcels for as little as $500 – could spark a resurgence of suburban backyard clandestine drug labs, with a significant amount of the illicit mailings arriving as chemical precursors rather than a finished product.
Australian Border Force (ABF) officers have been dispatched to Hong Kong to liaise with counterparts over the trend of recruiting young students, mostly at university, as drug collectors.
The Sunday Territorian can reveal the ABF identified the trend at their facility in Clyde in Sydney’s west, where 75 per cent of all surface mail entering Australia is first processed.
It was from here ABF intelligence uncovered a pattern in origins in China and elsewhere, including London, to flag the national issue of students, notably in Sydney and Melbourne’s western suburbs, providing their addresses to organised crime groups.
Once a student has agreed to receive a parcel for third parties, drugs are dispatched across the country to those addresses from China before Australian-based criminals then arrange a time with the students to collect the unopened parcels.
An HSC student from Parramatta was intercepted in September collecting a package with 5kg of ephedrine – a precursor for the drug ice.
The student admitted he had been paid to collect several packages; the goods were seized and the student and his parents warned that if he was caught again he would be prosecuted.
The practice of recruiting students to take parcel delivery of drugs was detected four years ago but a series of arrests and other measures had seen it dissipate.
ABF International Mail and Cargo Clearance Superintendent Phillip Anderson said the rise in criminal mail was staggering as was the increase in contraband size.
“So where before we maybe were getting half a kilo to 1kg, detections are now 5kg to 10kg which is, in a mail environment, extraordinary,” Supt Anderson said.
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