[9dev]

LOL. I’m on the receiving end of these customs declarations, and stories like this are the reason the copies are so notoriously hard to parse programmatically… lovely, thanks for sharing.

[Scoundreller]

What’s the “escape value” that triggers people to read the free text field? Or is it just zero?

And if zero, how often do they just get mistakenly processed as zero value?

[9dev]

Zero; or an arbitrary number; or a number that was destined for another field, but the commanding officer misread and filled the form wrong; or null; or as many digits as fit in the field. Any of these.

[magicalhippo]

In a case like this, they usually call ahead to let customs know, and follow up with the declaration ID once it has been sent.

Apart from that, customs is very tight lipped about what triggers manual processing of a declararion.

Though for example a large discrepancy between weight and value typically would lead to it getting flagged for manual processing, as I understand it.

[bdamm]

Whatever it is is likely to be part of the endless arms race between customs agencies and smugglers, so I doubt you'll get the privilege of finding out.