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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."
for copyright infringement.
A highly-developed and technological Knight Industries Two Thousand series motor vehicle.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
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.
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.
Kit = pieces of equipment.
If he'd taken it all, it would have been kit and caboodle.
It's how the English say equipment.
...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
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...
Well, Johnny Cash stole an entire car one piece at a time over a couple decades, if his music is any indication.
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.
I'd sure hate to lose my equipment while getting my kit off.
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?
Here's a link to the same story in American
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."
Zippers can be a bitch.
Dude, it's EMC we're talking about.
Most likely the $1 million kit consists of:
- A 250GB 5400 RPM SATA EMC-certified HD
- A pair of official EMC plastic brackets.
$2M of EMC equipment - wow, that's like five hard drives!
Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56 '57, '58' 59' kit It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67 '68, '69, '70 kit
Absolutely. Remember, this occurred in the USA, where corporations write the laws. This is why this guy, who probably stole a handful of hard drives worth about $2k (which EMC marks up to $1m), is going to jail for 30-something years, while a rapist or murderer can easily get out in 5 or 10.
You're talking about my dog, you insensitive clod!!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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.
Of course, once the parts were reassembled, the result was an EMC product, which has no actual value.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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.
You get enough gear and you don't need much support. For example once the yearly support costs for IBM3590 tape drives hit more than the cost of a reconditioned one it was just well past time to buy spares and show people how to switch them over. There are plenty of third party repairers for a lot of gear so long as you have plenty of time to get things fixed. Support is rarely as good as advertised so it's best to avoid every needing it at all is possible. Where I am none of the vendors even bother to have local support staff so not even the simplest thing is going to get fixed within a day by a vendor anyway. In the past one support call involved two days of attempting to convince the vendor that our one and only computer of the type they dealt with was actually covered by quite an expensive contract. It's a pain trying to deal with a vendors failure of their internal records system fractured by a takeover as well as fixing your own gear - after two days and several dozen calls I told them to leave me alone and refund the remainder of the contract.
The Australians got it from a British site, which helpfully changed the Americanism equipment to something more British.