Some members of the Bitcoin Minera Industry (BTC) have the habit of routinely undervaluing the shipments of mining platforms with customs and border protection of the United States (CBP) to reduce customs tasks, several people familiar with Coindesk said.
Now that the Donald Trump administration is increasing tariffs on most goods brought around the world, these attempts to avoid paying import positions are becoming more relevant than ever.
“[Industry members] Usually, you have ways to avoid [tariffs] When declaring a lower value in the packages, “Jill Ford, the founder of Bitford Digital, a company that specializes in the acquisition of equipment to the miners, told Coindesk in an interview.” That is risky, and I’m not suggesting it, but that’s really what they are doing to bring them. “
Bitcoin Mining has flourished in the United States in recent years, especially since China, once the epicenter of Bitcoin’s mining activity, prohibited practice in 2021, creating an exodus of the industry for jurisdictions such as Texas. But the specific integrated circuit market (ASIC) applications of $ 30 billion is dominated by Bitmain and Microbt, two Chinese companies that manufacture most of these Bitcoin mining machines in the facilities of Southeast Asia.
Signatures such as Bitford tend to act as intermediaries between manufacturers and miners, although ASIC can also acquire in the secondary market. The largest of these runners provides all types of hardware and energy infrastructure that miners may need.
The new commercial policy of the Trump administration, presented on April 2, threatened to impose significant rates for Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. A week later, the White House announced a 90 -day moratorium on some of these tariffs to negotiate new trade agreements. The resulting uncertainty has caused chaos for Bitcoin miners located in the United States, who now have to deal with the possibility of paying huge taxes on their ASIC shipments.
However, even before the tariffs were conceived, the miners regularly reported the value of their shipments to customs of the United States, Ford and other sources said.
“It’s a fraud. It is definitely illegal. But many people threw the dice and did it, and I don’t approve it,” Ford said. “If my client wants to do that, that’s in them … we ask, ‘What do you want to declare your package? How much?’ And if they say: ‘He simply declares how $ 300’, then that is what we will do.
Tightening controls
In Ford’s revelation, it used to be relatively easy to underestimate ASIC shipments: CBP rarely verified. But things began to change around November 2024 after Trump won the elections, Ford said, while another source with an experience in shipments, which spoke with Coindesk on anonymity condition, said that the recent CBP investigation into whether imported mining platforms were breaking sanctions related to chips may have taken the agency to more deeply analyze the mining sector as everything.
“Before, a mining platform that may be worth $ 3,000, we would declare that it was worth $ 300. It would simply pass. Now it is as if they were looking for the Internet to see what the value really is,” Ford said. “There really is no way to avoid it. I mean, you could declare it by 20% or 30%, but not as we used to do.”
Shipping size is important. The importation of one or two machines will generally escape from scrutiny, said Ford, but that is when the miners bring bulk machines that CBP analyzes more closely. Hundreds of thousands of mining platforms are imported to the United States every year.
However, CBP seems to be stricter in some states than in others, because these controls have not been evenly tight throughout the country, according to Ford.
“I have a client in Oregon who has no trouble detecting packages and bringing them well, but I have another client in Kentucky than [had] 100 machines worth $ 9,000 each caught in customs, ”said Ford.
“What finally happened in Kentucky is that we had to return the products to Hong Kong, and now we are like, well, where do we send it to get it? ‘ And I thought: “We should probably go through the CBP in Oregon or California,” because it’s just a nightmare to try to bring it to Kentucky. “
Imports are also affected by which the bearer is used. DHL is easier to overcome than UPS in Kentucky, while UPS tends to be less strict on the west coast than on the east coast, Ford said, and that is of common knowledge among its suppliers.
The discrepancy in the application is probably temporary, said the shipping expert to Coindesk. In his opinion, CBP probably decided to take a closer look at imports from the mining platform, but the application of the new directive is simply being implemented at a variable speed from the jurisdiction to the jurisdiction.
CBP did not respond a request for comments.
In an email after Coindesk, Ford seemed to qualify his comments, displacing the fault of the US -based operations.
“Only to be clear was not a practice driven by miners. For years, many Chinese mining suppliers did not routinely report the value of shipments, often declaring machines with the lowest possible value. This was not a scheme driven by the miners, but a generalized and controlled practice that became the norm due to the application of Laxa. Regulators of the regulators, “.
“We have always recommended to declare shipments correctly, even when that has meant losing business before competitors. Now, with a stricter application, more partners are realizing why this approach is important,” he wrote.
Bitford is a relatively new company in Bitcoin’s mining scene. Ford, who declared himself guilty of bank fraud and money laundering charges related to a loan related to COVID, was sentenced to 20 months in prison and had to pay $ 250,000 in restitution; He left last year and launched Bitford in October. The company has obtained more than $ 20 million in sales since then (not all of them of imported machines).
“I went to prison because I cursed a Covid loan,” he said, adding that she was a prisoner “with on the margin” while he is behind bars.
From a legal perspective
Shipments to the US are assigned their value by a registration importer, which means an entity confident to move the load through customs, a commercial lawyer, who requested the anonymity that would speak frankly about the matter, he told COINDESK.
The registration importer can be one of the three entities: the supplier, the corridor or the final customer. The three scenarios are relatively common.
CBP is in charge of the audit and can potentially fine or demand the duties of importers who have characterized the value of their shipments. The Department of Justice (DOJ) also has a unit in charge of enforcing the law of false claims (FCA) and chasing the parties that have disappointed the United States government.
The sanctions on the civil side can be up to three times the damages incurred by the United States government, while on the criminal side they can include imprisonment, although that is rare.
Until recently, the sanctions were generally considered a kind of cost of doing business, said the commercial lawyer, but with the greatest surveillance of the Trump administration on the issue of tariffs, that is no longer the case.
The effect of rates
The combination of tariff uncertainty and the greatest surveillance of CBP is to force some mining operations to reconsider their plans. Ford said approximately 50% of his clients were still advancing, while others were hitting the pause button. One of his clients, he said, is holding a container from China in the hope of not having to pay exorbitant tariffs in their shipment.
Tariffs “will probably cause a material speed speed, if they do not stop in new projects and will force projects that are currently implemented to reduce, or stop to reevaluate the needs and capital costs”, Taras Kulyk, co -founder and CEO of the Synteq digital mining hardware supplier, he told Coinndesk.
“Other jurisdictions that had previously seemed a higher cost [will] Become the objectives of the new infrastructure and the deployment of Capex, “he added.” Canada, in particular, will probably be a benefactor for the implementation of the global tariff regime that the White House established. “
Update (April 22, 15:10 UTC): The article was updated to eliminate a quote.
