A Houston couple with a side hustle of buying and reselling goods from surplus auctions recently purchased more than 100 heavy-duty storage containers from a website that deals in government surplus. When the cases arrived, a friend helped them load the containers into their storage unit. As a thank you, the couple gave the friend one of the containers. Turned out, the container wasn't empty like they had thought. From ABC13:
Inside were 12 fully-automatic M-16s, all of them still with various tags designating the military branch and name of service members who handled the weapons.
"We just purchased these cases. We never expected anything in there," said the husband, who did not want to be identified. "Supposedly, the sender should check every single box to make sure there's nothing dangerous or anything."[…]
Unsure of what to do, the couple reported the M-16s to authorities. Within hours, ATF and FBI agents seized the one open box with the 12 weapons. Shortly thereafter, the ATF obtained a search warrant for the couple's storage unit. They spent most of Monday on location, going through the boxes.
The ATF and FBI are currently investigating. Meanwhile, the online surplus reseller from whom they purchased the containers have removed all similar cases from their website.
