sarah.morrison said:

International shipping tracking for cross-border ordering orders: my experience with customs in the US when ordering from overseas: Seized and…

Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. Import rules are jurisdiction-specific and this board keeps giving US-shaped answers to non-US questions. What is a personal-import allowance in one country is a controlled-import offence in another.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine. Half the figures circulating in this community trace back to a secondary summary that dropped a qualifier.

COA_Karl said:

Import rules are jurisdiction-specific and this board keeps giving US-shaped answers to non-US questions.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. There is a difference between no evidence and evidence of no effect, and this subject is one where the two get swapped freely in both directions.

One thing that is still open after sophie_paris’s answer:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Update — I was wrong in the opening post, specifically about the direction. Correcting it here rather than editing it away.