South American drug traffickers are taking YouTube monetization to an entirely new level.
Authorities in Uruguay recently seized 444 kilos of cocaine, of which several bricks were stamped with the YouTube logo. Other packages had stickers of the YouTube logo plastered on them.
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The cocaine was discovered in the central Tacuarembo department of the South American country, which has become a popular transshipment destination for cocaine heading to Europe and Africa.
Police Chief Guillermo Maciel said during a press conference in Tacuarembo on Monday that their initial hypothesis was “that [the cocaine] would not stay here because it is good-quality cocaine, so it generally goes abroad.”
Video of the arrest released by Uruguay’s interior minister showed officers searching a truck and then arresting its driver on a rural highway. Authorities alleged the truck had picked up the packages after they were dropped from an airplane. The 24 and 36-year-old drivers of the vehicle were arrested, along with a third person, aged 20, who allegedly guided the others to where the drugs had been dropped, according to local Uruguayan newspaper La Diaria. Their identities were not made public.
Uruguayan officials claimed it was the largest seizure of cocaine ever in the Tacuarembo department.
“If it were divided into doses in the national market, it would go for $7 million (USD),” said Maciel. “The same drugs sold in Europe are $15 million.”
The bust was made in what authorities dubbed “Operation Albania,” although it’s unclear whether the drugs were connected to Albanian traffickers. Government officials said that they were unsure where the drugs originated from. It’s common for drugs that are shipped out of Uruguay’s ports to arrive via the neighboring nations Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Maciel said that they are working “in coordination with the intelligence agencies” of those three countries to investigate the case.
But the traffickers may have purposefully left a hint about who was behind the drugs. Along with the bricks labeled YouTube, numerous others were covered in stickers that said “King of the South” in Arabic.
The use of business logos on packages of drugs is common around Latin America and is often used to distinguish the quality or destination of the product. In July, authorities in Mexico discovered 1.6 tons of cocaine stamped with the logos of Tesla and the fashion designer Prada. The same month, Greek police found cocaine covered in a logo referencing NBA superstar LeBron James.
