Another Chinese arrested for economic espionage.

Can we ever trust the Chinese? A former IBM software engineer in China has been charged with 6 counts of economic espionage, including the theft of trade secrets.

Xu Jiaqiang, a 30 year old former IBM employee has been accused of using his access as a developer to steal and sell IBM’s proprietary source code to undercover law enforcement agents.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, having resigned from his job at IBM in May 2014, Xu allegedly stole the code. He took the code for a clustered file system which he thought would enable “faster computer performance by coordinating work among multiple servers”. Fortunately, for IBM, the code is only valuable if kept in-house.

After resigning from IBM, Xu tried to sell the code to two undercover law enforcement agents, who posed as investors who were in the process of launching a data storage company.

Over the course of six months, in 2015 Xu demonstrated the functionality of the code to the undercover agents who confirmed that it was a “functioning copy” of IBM’s own software.

In December 2015, Xu was arrested in White Plains, New York after he openly admitted to the undercover law enforcement agents that he used the code to make his own version of IBM’s software which he would sell to clients.

During his discussions with the agents, he even conceded that he had concealed a block of code that identifies it as a copyrighted work belonging to IBM.