Auckland International Airport
processes 21 million passengers every year and climbing.
Customs and Immigration have just been alerted to a visiting
Lithuanian woman with quite a history.
Officer James is keen to take on the case.
It looks like she had some trouble in the US on en route to New Zealand.
She's coming out of UK
so I'm going to have a talk with her and see what interactions she had
with the US authorities en route to New Zealand.
I need to ask you your reasons
for coming to New Zealand as well as what happened over in the USA.
The woman tries to front foot her situation by producing correspondence
with New Zealand authorities to avoid delay.
You see that you needed to have a visa for New Zealand
and you have a very important family events here in New Zealand.
Indeed, actually, I'm visiting my boyfriend
who actually who lives in New Zealand. Oh, great.
But I just
want to make sure that I can call you from an immigration perspective.
Lithuanian nationals can travel to New Zealand as visitors without a visa.
But James wants to know that she's not here to disappear.
Can I.
Can I ask how long you were living in the USA?
For like 17, 18 years.
Seventeen years?
Eighteen years? And what Visa did you hold?
What Visa were you holding?
Um, I was, the Visa um, I was issued the Visa over 20 years ago
I don’t exactly remember a truly specific Visa that was issued.
James knows she's lying.
His American counterparts have already told him she's never had a U.S.
visa. What about USA?
What about USA?
Yeah, what happened in the USA?
At Auckland’s Air Cargo facility,
Customs officer Hayden believes this parcel is worth checking out.
So we've identified a consignment here that we believe is suspicious.
It's come from West Africa, the country of Mali.
It's been declared as motor parts
worth 300,000 NZD, which is quite high considering the site of the consignment.
There doesn't seem to be any padding or protection for it.
It's hard to imagine what car parts could be worth $300,000,
let alone why the exporters were keen to get them here so quickly.
They agreed to pay 60 grand in customs charges for the privilege.
The items that are inside are very poorly packaged.
You'd expect there to be some packaging material
or some sort of order to the way that they package, but it just doesn't.
It looks like they've just been thrown in there together
and for something worth so much.
Yeah, the alarm bells are definitely ringing here.
There’s some organic material here of some kind, um, that doesn’t fit
the description of motor vehicle parts,
we just wouldn’t expect to find organic material in there.
The Republic of Mali seems to feature highly optimistic car park dealers.
The parts are worth a fraction of even the shipping cost.
This is the sort of product
you could pick up at your local parts store in New Zealand for
a small amount of money.
It's just not consistent with the valuation.
I'm not a mechanic, but I would expect this area
here to be free moving.
It looks like a bearing of some kind, but it's rock solid.
So again, alarm bells are definitely ringing here.
Hayden's no mechanic, but he knows how to swing a hammer.
That's broken the metal straight off.
So, again,not not something you'd expect from a part
so expensive.
While Hayden had his bearings
right, the manufacturers didn’t.
Hello, what do we have here?