The US Department of Justice (DoJ) pushed a fresh set of allegations onto Chinese telecom equipment provider Huawei on Thursday. The fed claims that it has evidence that Huawei engaged in activities such as digital stealing of trade secrets from at least 6 US companies which include Cisco and T-Mobile.
It was revealed in the new indictment that Huawei encouraged its employees in stealing proprietary data and when done so would reward its employees with cash and other incentives of the sort.
Almost 16 charges of the indictment were pushed against the Huawei CFO Meng Wenzhou, who is currently residing in Canada fighting extradition to the US.
United States department of justice states that Huawei started a cash bounty campaign in 2013 by asking its employees to obtain confidential information from its competitors and companies it supplies equipment too.
It was found that the Chinese telecom’s US subsidiaries Huawei USA and Futurewei conspired by stealing trade secrets from a trade show held in Chicago through an employee of WEIHUA, who took pictures of the circuits boards manufactured by his company’s competitors on a secret note.
DoJ stated in its statement that the Chinese vendor could have indulged in espionage since 2004 and might have so far installed backdoors in the equipment supplied to US companies to steal sensitive information that might have also been passed on to servers operating in China.
“All this is being done as a part of global growth strategy by stealing trade secrets of US competitors”, said Richard Burr, the Chairperson of the US Senate Intelligence Committee.
According to Burr, Huawei employees used to get into agreements with US companies, then violate terms by handing over the company secrets to the Chinese government. As the spies were being rewarded heavily, this secret did not come into open until US President Donald Trump imposed a ban on Huawei in early 2019.
More details will be posted shortly!
