saw this in the news a few years ago.
a farmer complained of a trespasser. the police found a middle-aged Chinese man walking through a freshly-planted field with a container of seeds. turns out he was collecting US seeds and taking them back to China for research purposes.
https://ambrook.com/offrange/legislation...-law-china
Roughly a decade ago, Chinese national Mo Hailong caught the attention of the FBI and the DOJ because he was stealing corn seeds. In a scheme that played out for five years before his conviction in 2016, Mo was sending seeds from the Midwest, where he owned two farms, back to China.
“Contained within the stolen inbred seeds — which, unlike common hybrid seeds, can be replanted year after year — were the valuable trade secrets of U.S. companies DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto,” the FBI wrote of the case in a later blog post.
According to the agency, they spent four years tracking Mo, a Chinese citizen with legal permanent residency in the U.S. The case “led agents on cat-and-mouse surveillance operations across the Midwest and took them on a deep dive into the biotechnology of proprietary corn breeding,” they wrote.
I think he was stealing seeds from a neighbor's farm.
a lot of economic / industrial espionage.
a farmer complained of a trespasser. the police found a middle-aged Chinese man walking through a freshly-planted field with a container of seeds. turns out he was collecting US seeds and taking them back to China for research purposes.
https://ambrook.com/offrange/legislation...-law-china
Roughly a decade ago, Chinese national Mo Hailong caught the attention of the FBI and the DOJ because he was stealing corn seeds. In a scheme that played out for five years before his conviction in 2016, Mo was sending seeds from the Midwest, where he owned two farms, back to China.
“Contained within the stolen inbred seeds — which, unlike common hybrid seeds, can be replanted year after year — were the valuable trade secrets of U.S. companies DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto,” the FBI wrote of the case in a later blog post.
According to the agency, they spent four years tracking Mo, a Chinese citizen with legal permanent residency in the U.S. The case “led agents on cat-and-mouse surveillance operations across the Midwest and took them on a deep dive into the biotechnology of proprietary corn breeding,” they wrote.
I think he was stealing seeds from a neighbor's farm.
a lot of economic / industrial espionage.
once known as El Goobero