Crack99.com operator gets 12 years of hard time

Chinese piracy ring operator sentenced after selling military-related software

Crack99.com operator gets 12 years of hard time after being lured to the US.

by Cyrus Farivar - June 12 2013

On Tuesday, a Chinese national was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and criminal copyright infringement. The sentencing is part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors over a massive software piracy ring. Once the prison term is complete, Xiang Li will be deported back to China.

According to court filings cited by Bloomberg News, Li is the first Chinese citizen to be “apprehended and prosecuted in the US for cybercrimes he engaged in entirely from China." Li was arrested in 2011 by undercover federal agents when he traveled from China to the United States territory of Saipan to make a sale.

Enlarge / This is an actual diagram that American prosecutors introduced in court.

United States Attorney

The 36-year-old ran Crack99.com, which advertised industrial-grade software used in the defense, semiconductor, and telecommunications industries. On Crack99, licensing protections had been circumvented for sold software, including “Satellite Tool Kit 8.0, “Quartus II Nios Embedded Suite v9.0,” and “HyperSizer,” among others.

“Between April 2008 and June 2011, Xiang Li engaged in over 700 transactions through which he distributed over $100 million of pirated software (PDF) to over 400 customers located in at least 28 states and over 60 foreign countries,” the United States Attorney’s Office in the District of Delaware wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “These software products were owned by approximately 200 different American software manufacturers, ranging from large corporations to small businesses. Xiang Li also sold 20 gigabytes of confidential and proprietary data obtained from the internal computer network of at least one 'cleared defense contractor.'”

The government added that Li sold software to Dr. Wronald Best, a scientist at an American government contractor. Best used the software to design components for Patriot missiles and the radar aboard the Marine One presidential helicopter. Best was sentenced to more than a year in prison earlier this year.