Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 29, 2017

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DUMB CRIMINAL OF THE WEEK: PSSTT… WANNA BUY SOME SECRETS?

by Hazed

A contractor who wanted to make money by selling trade secrets to the Russians has been sent to jail for five years after being caught by the FBI.

50-year-old Gregory Allen Justice was an engineer working on GPS, the military comms network, and covert reconnaissance satellites. He worked with documents which were not actually classified but which were covered by arms export agreements.

So when he approached the Russian consulate in California, proposing to sell secrets on military communications, he was definitely breaking the law.

Unfortunately for him, his attempt to contact the Russians was noticed so the FBI put him under observation, then set up a sting operation. An FBI operative posed as a Russian agent and contacted Justice. The engineer passed the agent USB drives containing trade secrets. In return, he was given cash payments of $500 or $1,000.

Justice claimed his reason for selling secrets was that his wife was sick, and he needed the money to pay her medical bills. But he actually spent the money on a woman he met online – who he thought was an Eastern European, but in fact was living in California and was catfishing him. He handed $21,420 to the fake lover, and meanwhile he told his wife she’d have to delay her medical treatments due to lack of money.

As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the prosecution claimed that at one of the meetings between Justice and the FBI agent, Justice asked the agent for help in procuring a muscle relaxant called Anectine. This can be fatal if wrongly administered.

He said it was to help his wife breathe more easily and that she had been treated with it before. But he was lying: she had never been prescribed Anectine. He also told the agent he was aware of cases he’d seen online where the drug had been used to kill people.

The prosecution wanted Justice’s sentence to be increased because of his plans to murder his wife, but the Judge did not agree that he would have actually gone through with it, so stuck with the five years.

No news on whether the wife will be waiting for him when he gets out – or whether the Californian catfisher will have to pay back the money!

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/engineer_selling_secrets_to_russians_got_5yrs/

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