Quote Originally Posted by thrashaholic
The second happenned to me in Frankfurt airport after having visited my dad there. I was taking a DVD player back to the UK in my hand luggage, but German customs didn't particularly like it (even though I'm an EU resident travelling within the EU), they decided that they would send me over to some customs official who couldn't speak English and had to scan it with some special machine. It was all terribly confusing and time-consuming, and all over one little DVD player, oh well, that's life....
They might have been checking it for explosives... I've had laptops and things checked for that before - they have a little swab, which they wipe over it - and stick in a machine - I suppose it picks up traces of chemicals or whatever. I would imagine the DVD player was checked like this, as it would have been difficult to check that is was a functioning DVD player? Or was it a portable? Regardless - there's a lot of empty space in electronic devices these days - just enough for a few grammes of semtex or whatever.