Gold paste under seat 22C, 2,300 fake jerseys

Two cases from June 3–4: a Delhi airport cabin sweep and a parcel facility in suburban Paris.

The Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi received specific intelligence before Flight IX-136 touched down from Sharjah on June 1. 1 One team went to intercept the passenger at the arrival bus gate. A second team boarded the empty aircraft and swept the cabin.

Under seat 22C — not in the overhead bin, not in a bag, but beneath the seat itself — they found two heavy black pouches packed with a thick paste. 1 The passenger had been sitting in seat 23C, directly behind the cache, for the entire flight from Sharjah. 2

The paste weighed 3,550 grams gross. After chemical processing to strip out the binding agents and wax — gold paste is a common form for cross-border smuggling precisely because it scans ambiguously — the pure 24-karat gold recovered came to 2,755 grams, officially valued at ₹3,80,48,523 (approximately US$455,000). 1 3

The passenger was arrested under Section 104 of the Customs Act, 1962; the gold was confiscated under Section 110. 1 Investigators are now working to identify the syndicate behind the shipment.

The pouch was not on the passenger's body, not in his checked luggage, and not in his carry-on. It was left in a seat he had no assigned reason to be near — one row ahead — and would have gone undetected if the AIU hadn't specifically swept the cabin based on intelligence. This one used the aircraft itself as the temporary storage unit.

On the morning of June 3, French customs officers at a processing facility in Chelles — a commune in Seine-et-Marne, about 20 km east of Paris — worked through a pile of parcels with box cutters. 4 Every parcel contained the same thing: fake France national team and PSG football jerseys, all shipped from Chinese online marketplaces.

In the five days leading up to that morning, nearly 2,300 counterfeit jerseys had been intercepted in the Paris region alone. 4 5 The consignments arrived wrapped in what a customs officer described on camera for France 2 as packaging that was deliberately neutral — "Sous un plastique relativement neutre qui ne correspond pas du tout au conditionnement standard de la marque" ("In neutral plastic wrap that bears no resemblance to the brand's standard packaging"). 4

The officers' spot-check method on the jerseys: flip the shirt inside out and look at the stars. The two championship stars embroidered on the inside of the official France jersey are rendered in precise, flat stitching. On the fakes: "Sur les deux étoiles à l'intérieur par exemple, on voit que c'est une qualité qui est plutôt mauvaise, et qui ne correspond pas à un produit fini officiel" — "On the two stars on the inside, you can see the quality is rather poor and doesn't match an official finished product." 4

A 14-year-old supporter interviewed near Paris explained why the market for fakes exists: "C'est 10 euros le maillot. J'ai celui de Chelsea, Liverpool et de l'AC Milan. En vrai, ça devrait être 100 euros. Mais c'est des copies, pas des vrais" ("It's €10 a jersey. I've got Chelsea, Liverpool, and AC Milan ones. In real life they should be €100. But they're copies, not real ones.") 4

The Direction interrégionale des Douanes et Droits Indirects d'Île-de-France, the Paris region's customs authority, reported that in all of 2025, French customs intercepted nearly 3 million counterfeit items delivered by postal route — with sports articles topping the category list. 4 The 2026 World Cup kicks off June 11.