Police find over £12,000 in hollowed out consoles

It must be ever so satisfying for policemen when a raid turns up more than originally anticipated. Like when you’re looking for SD cards and you find over 12K inside gutted consoles.

A raid undertaken to investigate a man operating an illegal business selling Sony PSP SD memory cards and chipping offences resulted in the discovery of over £12,000 in cash stuffed into a single original Microsoft Xbox console and three PlayStation2 consoles.

Originally the man was thought to have been selling PSP games on SD cards and providing a console chipping service.

The dosh stash was only discovered when the consoles, which had been seized by Tower Hamlets Trading Standards investigators and officers from the Metropolitan Police, were handed over to ELSPA (the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association) IP Crime Unit investigators.

As part of the standard procedure, the ELSPA removed the covers of the consoles to see if the bloke had done any DIY console-improvement jobs on his own kit. They usually look for tampered hard drives and the like.

Upon removal of the cases, the ELSPA found that the Xbox was worth £5,925, and each of the three PS2s were worth £2,835 £2,025, and £1,425, respectively. There it was, all neatly packed into little plastic bank bags.

Aside from all this money, presumably garnered from the little racket he had going on with the SD cards and the chipping, he was caught in possession of 75 PSP games on SD memory cards.

You’d think he’d open up a bank account with all that money.