In June of 2011, Xiang Li sat in a hotel room in Saipan, trying to close a deal with US businessmen. The 35-year-old entrepreneur from Chengdu, China had brought along some samples of his wares—a collection of software on DVDs ready for resale; sample packaging materials and associated designs; and 20 gigabytes of proprietary data from software developers. And every bit of it was stolen.
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Xiang himself was not a hacker. He was an aggregator, paying others to circumvent the license keys and DRM of various software packages and then redistributing them through his site. Working with others who acted as a financial go-between, he sold from a library of about 550 different software titles, including sophisticated engineering design, modeling, and simulation tools that sold for as much as $250,000 through legitimate channels.
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Some of the software companies whose products Xiang was illegally reselling were all too aware of what he was doing, since he openly advertised their software on his website. But because he operated out of China, and through a veil of anonymity online, there was little they could do directly to stop him. The software wasn't sold directly through the site, but through a network of filesharing servers around the world, and each purchase was negotiated through e-mail. As Xiang told investigators during the sting, he had a simple way of dealing with software firms who sent him e-mails telling him to stop selling their products—he just deleted the e-mails.
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ICE has confirmed sales by Crack99 to at least 325 different purchasers worldwide; a third of his buyers were in the US. And some of his best customers were people working for the US government—and not in a law enforcement capacity.
One of those customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, now a former electronics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Between 2008 and 2010, Wedderburn purchased 12 software packages from Xiang with a total retail value of over $1.2 million. Another, Dr. Wronald Best—a former US Navy scientist who had taken a position as chief scientist for a defense consulting firm in Kentucky—purchased 10 software packages worth over $600,000.
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And these government employed persons didn't suspect there were buying illegal software?...
Xiang himself was not a hacker. He was an aggregator, paying others to circumvent the license keys and DRM of various software packages and then redistributing them through his site. Working with others who acted as a financial go-between, he sold from a library of about 550 different software titles, including sophisticated engineering design, modeling, and simulation tools that sold for as much as $250,000 through legitimate channels.
...
Some of the software companies whose products Xiang was illegally reselling were all too aware of what he was doing, since he openly advertised their software on his website. But because he operated out of China, and through a veil of anonymity online, there was little they could do directly to stop him. The software wasn't sold directly through the site, but through a network of filesharing servers around the world, and each purchase was negotiated through e-mail. As Xiang told investigators during the sting, he had a simple way of dealing with software firms who sent him e-mails telling him to stop selling their products—he just deleted the e-mails.
...
ICE has confirmed sales by Crack99 to at least 325 different purchasers worldwide; a third of his buyers were in the US. And some of his best customers were people working for the US government—and not in a law enforcement capacity.
One of those customers was Cosburn Wedderburn, now a former electronics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Between 2008 and 2010, Wedderburn purchased 12 software packages from Xiang with a total retail value of over $1.2 million. Another, Dr. Wronald Best—a former US Navy scientist who had taken a position as chief scientist for a defense consulting firm in Kentucky—purchased 10 software packages worth over $600,000.
Complete article Link