When the first real super class tent, the North Face VE 24 came out, there was only one outdoor store chain in Denmark that had it.
So they decided that marking it up by 200% would be a fine thing to do.
I parrallel imported a whole bunch of those for friends and friends's friends.
I had my buddy in california repack them and include a letter in Danish, that i wrote, saying. " We've rented a camper, so we don't need the tent anymore". That way the Danish tax people couldn't slap an import tax on them
Butch, you need to loose your paranoia.
In the 10+ years that I hitchhiked around the world, and camped out more often than not, I didn't have a single bad encounter, except for a big grizzly bear up in Canada, that turned out to be 2 drunk indians.
If I'd been packing, that incident would have been real embarrasing.