US Charges Huawei With Racketeering Over Stolen Trade Secrets
The Department of Justice brings sweeping RICO charges against Huawei, accusing the tech giant of a decades-long conspiracy to steal American intellectual property. The indictment details numerous alleged instances of corporate espionage and trade secret misappropriation.
The US Department of Justice and the FBI bring 16 new charges against Huawei, including a conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute. Federal prosecutors allege that Huawei and its affiliates use confidential agreements with American companies to access trade secrets, which they then misappropriate to fund and grow their own business over the past two decades.
The 56-page indictment provides specific examples of this alleged intellectual property theft, including an instance where Huawei steals source code from a US router company, widely believed to be Cisco. In another striking example, a Huawei-affiliated engineer wears a badge spelling the company's name backwards at a Chicago trade show and takes secret photographs of a competitor's networking circuitry in the middle of the night.
Furthermore, the legal filing accuses Huawei of immediately sharing confidential business presentations from potential partners with its own competing engineering teams. By distributing these proprietary materials internally, Huawei allegedly uses rival developments to advance its own prototypes, forming a broad pattern of corporate espionage that fuels its ongoing operations.