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Customs officers at Tashkent’s international airport have intercepted twenty latest-model iPhones worth nearly 310 million soums after discovering that passengers had manipulated the devices’ software to display false identification codes on their customs declarations.
Under Uzbekistan’s current rules, travellers must declare all mobile devices brought into the country — whether for personal use or commercial purposes — and must record each handset’s IMEI number, the unique identifier assigned to every mobile phone, in their passenger customs declaration. The scheme uncovered at the airport exploited a gap between what a phone displays in its settings and what its hardware actually transmits.
How the Fraud Worked
Passengers reinstalled the operating software on the smartphones they were carrying and programmed those devices to show IMEI codes belonging to handsets that had previously been smuggled into Uzbekistan through separate, undeclared channels. The result was a discrepancy that only a specific technical check could expose: the IMEI visible in the phone’s own settings menu differed from the code returned when customs officers sent a USSD query — a direct network-level request that bypasses the device’s software display. That mismatch gave officers grounds to seize the phones.
The State Customs Committee’s press service, which disclosed the interceptions, said customs checks into the cases are continuing and that measures are being taken to identify similar attempts. No figures were given for the number of passengers involved or for any administrative or criminal proceedings already initiated.
The total declared value of the twenty seized iPhones was put at just under 310 million soums. At current exchange rates that represents a significant commercial consignment, consistent with the devices being destined for resale rather than personal use — though the customs authority stopped short of characterising the intent in its public statement.
The episode illustrates a broader challenge facing Uzbek customs: as smartphone import duties and registration requirements have tightened, methods for circumventing them have grown more technically sophisticated, moving from simple under-declaration of quantities to firmware-level manipulation of device identifiers.