14 people, of which 8 are former employees of the company Foxconn, were sentenced to prison terms for changing the "identity" of no less than 9000 iPhone terminals in order to sell them in China.
We are talking about terminals iPhone bought in the USA that contained the necessary certificates to work on the mobile phone networks in China, they were modified by these people to be used in China where they were resold for a serious profit.
Some of those people illegally accessed Foxconn's databases to steal identification certificates for iPhone terminals, which were used to convert the devices and activate them in China to work on local phone networks.
468,750 dollars were generated by the sale of these iPhone terminals in China in approximately 5 months, the period in which the group was active, the amount representing the profit generated from the sale of smartphones that cost up to 6.3 million dollars in the USA.
A court in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou sentenced 14 people – including eight former Foxconn employees – to various sentences for hacking into the database of the Taiwanese electronics assembler to steal digital identity certificates. Those certificates allowed the accused to turn iPhones purchased in the US – totaling about 9,000 handsets in all – into devices that work on Chinese telecom networks, the court found.
This is the first time that such a case has come to the attention of the media and the first time that a conviction of this kind has been given, even though the crimes were committed between 2011 and 2012, so over 3 years ago, the strange being the provision information only today.
Having said that, Foxconn does not take kindly to the business of those who change the identities of iPhone terminals in order to generate profit from their resale, and it is possible that in the future we will hear about new similar cases.
