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EMC Engineer Steals Almost $1 Million of Kit One Piece at a Time
aesoteric writes "An EMC test engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1 million worth of kit from his employer. He reportedly stole the unspecified goods from the storage giant's North Carolina factory using 'a small bag' to smuggle the kit out before selling it on the internet under a pseudonym."
In the electronics industry, "pulling a kit" is compiling all of the discrete components that you need to get your job done. It's compiling all of the resistors and ICs and other things you need to build a batch of something, or it's compiling whatever you need to fix something.
The article is ridiculously scant on details. It makes no sense. A million bucks worth of kit, smuggled out in a "small bag?!" That's a lot of "small bags" to be taken in and out over a period of time. Might as well held up the loading dock at gunpoint and ran off with the crates.
It's how the English say equipment.
EMC firmware license requires a support contract to be valid. Yes, it is illegal to use the hardware you purchase from them, if you don't keep paying them for support.
Considering how much they mark up hardware as well, there's no way he actually had more than $50k of gear.
'kit' is a well known and old term for 'stuff'. A kit bag was what (may be still is) military used for their personal stuff - razor etc. In any case, this reminds me of the story about the guy working at the factory who was seen taking wheelbarrows of trash from the premises day after day. Security could not figure out what was going on. Finally confronted the man, who eventually confessed to stealing wheelbarrows...
TFA was originally published on a UK website, so this is British English speaking. 'kit' in this context means 'equipment'. EMC presumably refers to www.emc.com; and BL trading would be www.bltrading.com
This is a story about an crime committed in Apex, North Carolina by a man from Sanford, NC and tried in a Boston, Massachusetts court. Why does the summary link to a story in an Australian web site? Why not, say, to this: http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/crime_files/crime_watch/nc-man-pleads-guilty-to-stealing-from-emc-corp-25-apx-20110107 or this: http://www.abc6.com/Global/story.asp?S=13800798?
Wire fraud, in the United States Code, is any criminally fraudulent activity that has been determined to have involved electronic communications of any kind, at any phase of the event. The involvement of electronic communications adds to the severity of the penalty, so that it is greater than the penalty for fraud that is otherwise identical except for the non-involvement of electronic communications. As in the case of mail fraud, the federal statute is often used as a basis for a separate, federal prosecution of what would otherwise have been a violation only of a state law.
The crime of wire fraud is codified at 18 U.S.C. 1343, and reads as follows:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
In the case of United States v. LaMacchia, a student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was charged with wire fraud when, because he had not profitted personally from online distribution of millions of dollars' worth of illegally copied software, he could not be charged with criminal copyright infringement. The United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, dismissed the charges, noting they were an attempt to find a broad federal crime where the more narrowly defined one had not occurred. Congress then amended the copyright law to limit further use of this loophole. Wire fraud
The reference is to the NET Act of 1997. "No Electronic Theft."
The story is from an Australian news site. The term "kit" in this context is synonymous with "components." Depending on their intended purpose, individual components can be quite expensive; I've held fairly small circuit board assemblies in my hand that were worth $30,000 USD apiece. It is entirely believable that this guy stole $1M worth of gear using a small bag.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Kit. Equipment. Stuff. From here: "Today, Apex manufactures and ships EMC's market-leading EMC® CLARiiON® CX series of networked storage systems, EMC Celerra® network attached storage systems and EMC Centera(TM) content addressed storage systems."
I'm assuming that the equipment and software stolen was from those product lines.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.