Former Apple Engineer Flees to China After Stealing Data

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🇨🇳 Former Apple Engineer Escapes to China After Stealing Thousands of Files

What happened: A former Apple engineer has been charged by the US for stealing thousands of files containing proprietary data and fleeing to China.

Who is he? 

• Name: Weibao Wang

• Age: 35

• US residence: Mountain View, California

Timeline: 

• 2016: Wang was hired by Apple as an engineer

• 2018: He resigned from Apple for a US-based job with a Chinese company (unnamed) working on self-driving cars.
  
  * But he waited 4 months before informing Apple of his new job.

  • Law enforcement searched his residence and discovered that, upon leaving Apple, he had stolen substantial proprietary data regarding self-driving car technology software and hardware.

  • On the same day of telling US authorities that he had no plans to leave the US, he boarded a one-way flight to China.

Significance: This is not an isolated case. Two other former Apple employees, Xiaolang Zhang and Jizhong Chen, were previously charged in similar trade secret theft cases. Zhang attempted to flee to China too but was arrested in 2018.

Just dropping this here to wrap things up 👇🏻