Pair Arrested for Selling Tech Secrets

Two people, including a Samsung Electronics researcher, were arrested for attempting to smuggle a recently developed core mobile phone technology developed by Samsung Electronics to Kazakhstan in exchange for billions of won, police said yesterday.

The Seoul Central District’s National High-Tech Crime Unit, led by Lee Gun-joo, said on March 22 that Lee (35), a senior researcher at Samsung Electronics, and Jang (34), a planning director at Free Zone, an overseas real estate consulting firm, were arrested on charges of violating Korean trade secret laws.

Last November 22, Lee managed to access the Samsung wireless development team’s communication networks in Maetan-dong, Suwon-City, Gyeonggi Province. He downloaded diagrams of Samsung’s two newest mobile phone models and printed them on 15 sheets of A4-sized paper. He then took them outside and gave them to Jang, a friend from elementary and middle school, who was waiting for him near his office.

Jang then showed the diagrams to two people from a Kazakhstan-based information technology company.

After the officials from N returned from Kazakhstan, Lee and Jang wrote a MOW which includes terms and conditions on delivering the technologies to them on November 27 and sent it to company N.

As N did not give any response, Jang gave each of the circuit diagrams of the two mobile phones to a person from Kazakhstan in Korea in December, asking to “give it to N.”

Lee and Jang reportedly asked for $2 million in return for passing on the core technologies and $1 million in case of him moving to work for the company N.

However, the person from Kazakhstan who received the circuit diagrams did not give them to N, and reported it to the National Information Service and the Prosecutors’ Office, which in turn led to Lee and Jang being arrested. As the circuit diagrams were acquired in the process of investigation, there was no technology leak.

Samsung Electronics estimated if the technologies had been leaked, a total of 1.3 trillion won could have been lost, including the development cost of the mobile phones worth 2.65 billion won and the expected sales loss for the next five years worth 534.3 billion won.

Tae-Hoon Lee jefflee@donga.com