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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."
Im sorry - define Kit? thanks
for copyright infringement.
BL Trading is also being charged with sale and receipt of stolen property, wire fraud and the installing and selling on of products with EMC firmware that didn’t have support contracts to take care of them.
WTF?
What is "kit" in this instance?
"Kit and kit! What is kit?!" - Spock's Brain
Willie...
wire fraud? seriously? These tack-on charges make a mockery of the law.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
...of a tale my dad used to tell me when I was young.
I don't know the full details, so it could be made up, the details could be wrong or it might have actually been like a TV show or something, but anyhoo.
A guy who worked in a factory would leave every day with a wheelbarrow full of rubbish. One of his bosses was sure he was stealing something, so every now and then he'd search the wheelbarrow and come up dry - rubbish, rubbish and more rubbish. The manager got so frustrated, he started searching every single day and still found nothing.
Eventually, the guy figured out what he was stealing - wheelbarrows.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
'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...
It's amazing how much you can get if you steal constantly.
For example, Salim Kara made several million dollars stealing coins from light rail boxes
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/thief+stole+nearly+million+coin+time/4028648/story.html
this EMC Celerra NS model 120-121-122-123-124-125-126-127-128-129-130 NAS I just bought off craigslist.
What kind of market is there for dodgy EMC gear? I always got the impression that EMC were the chaps you talked to if you didn't mind paying too much; but really wanted to have the vendor breathing down your neck for the duration of the (expensive) support agreement. Are there companies that shell out for that, and then start buying replacement parts on Ebay? Or, like Cisco, is there an active market of people trying to put together certification study kits on the relative cheap?
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."
And 32 years for that , this just shows how screwed up our courts are where you can get less time for murder then for theft.
In the American federal system, crimes of violence are almost always prosecuted under state law. Economic and property crimes with a significant interstate or foreign dimension are a federal responsibility.
If the feds do have jurisdiction in a murder case, don't expect anyone to get off lightly. It happens so rarely that there is little incentive to bargain.
I company I used to work for was operated by someone too naive to understand it was the support and not the intrinsic equipment that mattered. I came in and they were using some Cheapo NAS box that used 4 drives on two IDE channels as the storage in RAID5. Of course one drive failed and took out a channel, so after I recovered the data (it was backed up, but I recovered data off the three working drives), it was time to look for a replacement. I was told a very very very puny budget, so I priced out basically the same thing except with 4 IDE channels and bought as a new, supported, warrantied server. After a few days, the President announced he found the perfect 'enterprise' Dell enclosure on eBay and that was going to be the solution.... Even off random ebay guy, as an enclosure only (excluding controller and server to drive it), at much reduced capacity it was about twice as much as the server I suggested (President was willing to stretch the budget he dictated because he found himself such a 'good deal').
Of course, after two weeks of operation, the midplane somehow glitched in a way to corrupt drives and lose all data. Dell charged quite a bit for the service call to come in and fix the stupid thing since there was no support or warranty remotely associated with the thing, and the enclosure still had no warranty associated with it. He never admitted that it was a mistake. My second-worst job didn't last too much longer after that (got fired because they decided they needed to open a position to afford to look for a person with MCSE at the time).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
$2M of EMC equipment - wow, that's like five hard drives!
So kit = stuff = gear. So what? Why do they not specify what this stuff is? I've unfortunately had my home robbed and neither the police report or insurance report said "They stole stuff".
I remember years ago when I was working at Motorola, we had a guy who was stealing loads of pagers. He would take smoking breaks several times a day. Every time he would take his smokes and coffee. Even in those days the guards would check out your bag, but he would not check in your coffee cup. That sucker took 2 pagers several times a day, 5 days a week for a long time.
He would then have his buddy who owned a pager store sell them. Made tons of cash.
Another guy was diverting whole tractor trailer trucks to his address! He stole millions! He was only caught because one time a truck returned because of a bad address. That was so awesome. Big scandal. Soon after we got metal detectors at all the doors. Lame.
As EMC is by far the largest producer of IT storage equipment and software...And is the parent company of VMware, Iomega, Mozy, etc... I think it's your own fault if you pick "ElectroMagnetic Conformance" as likely instead of knowing something about IT.