MUX (The Hardy Boys)

MUX, Incorporated is a company in the fictional, The Hardy Boys Casefiles book series. The word mux is an abbreviation of the word multiplexer, which is a communications switching device.

At the time of Casefiles #21 Street Spies, MUX was a multinational front for a band of technology pirates, in New York City, that were stealing new product ideas from world leaders in miniaturized transmitters and receivers (like World-Wide Technologies) after the products were out of the expensive design and development stage. Then they would tap the enormous Third-World labor pool and sell the products much cheaper than companies like World-Wide Technologies could. The Hardys ended up catching the MUX agent in charge of that particular operation, Louise Trent and her strong-arm man, Chung Lei. The rest of MUX stayed intact and left the USA. Later, at the time of Casefile #37, they came back to the country to steal a highly advanced computer chip created by Prometheus Computing. But the Hardys again managed to foil MUX’s plan and catch the agents involved, even so the group is still a large.

In Casefile #21 the company’s finances were funneled through off-shore banks in the Caribbean and in Panama. Its products were shipped through Taiwan from other countries on the Pacific Rim.

The Hardys have never been able to find out who the mastermind behind MUX is — the mastermind who has covered himself (or herself) with layers upon layers of umbrella organizations.