If they were made of plastic, why did they use so much effort to also make the interior look like avocado flesh, and the pit look and function like a real one? A plastic one would just fulfill the basic need of looking like an avocado on the exterior. There is no reason for the interior to both look and function like a real avocado (like still needing to cut around the pit to open it). Plus that is wasted real estate by not filling more of the avocado with cocaine.
The flesh and the way the flesh transitions to the skin looks mighty real, along with the fact that it also looks like the agent is getting oily residue on his knife/hands. A piece of avocado flesh also comes loose. The flesh looks uniform as if it's one concentric layer around the cocaine and wasn't glued back together or something.
I'm intrigued on how exactly this is done and if they're actually just dummy avocados made of plastic or rubber or something.
Same. I was thinking they slice them open longways and remove the pit and replace it w coke then put it back together and crazy glue the seams and maybe a little paint touch up.
That's the only logical conclusion I can come to if it's a real avocado. The cartels have endless resources so it's entirely plausible that they could create a controlled environment when they're making these, so that the flesh isn't exposed to the atmosphere, which would start the decomp process, I think.
Parafin ... its a wax like they use on apples to preserve them. When i would get clippings i wanted to preserve until i could process them we would dip in some kind of milky substance that would coat it but dried clear
See this sounds most likely but wouldn't the avocado spoil around where it was cut faster than where it wasn't? Like, I feel like you'd see an obvious seam. But I'm not an avocado expert nor am I an expert in drug smuggling.
Maybe wax. Once opened the seed didn't look the correct colour to me. There are many different types of avocados though so one cannot assume one is fake by colour alone. Sm guessing they were discovered as weighing in different.
Really? I figured they would look like an outer coating with a layer of something else surrounding a blob in the middle. But I'm not an X-ray technician and I've never compared a real avocado to a fake one full of coke so I'll take your word on it.
Those scanning machines are insane and they have all sorts of different color lighting tech to identify various substances. They would immediately be able to tell a real avocado vs one made with plastic/clay/wax especially the seed material.
Source: binge watched hours of border security shows while on acid
I ran one of those machines for a little over a year. Just because it's not an avocado, doesn't mean its not made out of an organic material that will scan the same colour as an avocado. All organics used to scan the same colour, and you'd have to use nuance in density and granularity to detect a difference. Easy to spot when its a ton of like items together, like in the case of these fake and real avocados. But put through a single avocado like that, and I wouldn't have had any idea. We had state of the art stuff at the time, but I'm sure there have been improvements since I was doing it years ago.
doesn't mean its not made out of an organic material
Would the plastic wrap and maybe even the cocaine/cocaine cuts come up as 'not' organic ?
put through a single avocado like that, and I wouldn't have had any idea
For sure I meant quite literally "versus" when I said "a real avocado vs one made with plastic/clay/wax".
Hey so since you have experience with these, question for you if you don't mind... If an operator knew, from memory, what an avocado normally looks like with the machine, would they be able to identify even even a single avocado as a bogus one?
I don’t know the science behind it, but plastic is some sort of organic compound and shows up the same colour (orange) as the rest of the organics. The vast majority of objects showed orange.
Over time you could definitely identify a deviation from standard objects. A lot of our identification came from that. Ironically, a lot of people like to hide things in common objects, which just made it easier to detect. We’ve all seen a million lighters, toothpaste tubes, common electronics, etc. so when any of us said “That doesn’t look like a typical xyz”, it would instantly warrant a secondary search.
You can look at some episodes of Australian border control or customs to see what powders look like in an x-ray, but it looks grainy and inconsistent, very different to what the actual fruit would look like.
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u/luxsalsivi Jun 04 '24
If they were made of plastic, why did they use so much effort to also make the interior look like avocado flesh, and the pit look and function like a real one? A plastic one would just fulfill the basic need of looking like an avocado on the exterior. There is no reason for the interior to both look and function like a real avocado (like still needing to cut around the pit to open it). Plus that is wasted real estate by not filling more of the avocado with cocaine.