The Department of Justice has announced that a U.S. woman was sentenced to 15 months in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $275,000 after pleading guilty to export and other violations.
According to a DOJ press release, beginning in about April 2019 the woman used a front company to help her co-conspirators (one of whom had previously been debarred from contracting with the U.S. government) fraudulently procure contracts to supply critical military components to the Department of Defense. These individuals falsely represented that the front company was a vetted and qualified manufacturer of military components when those parts were actually manufactured in Turkey.
To aid in that manufacture the woman used software that allowed one of the conspirators to remotely control her computer and obtain sensitive, export-controlled drawings of critical U.S. military technology. The DOJ states that the woman took this action despite having executed numerous agreements promising to safeguard the drawings from unlawful access or export and in spite of the clear warnings on the face of each drawing that it could not be exported without obtaining a license.
Once the parts were made in Turkey they were shipped to the U.S. woman, who repackaged them and made sure to remove any reference to their Turkish origin.
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