Woman Busted For Selling Phony Computer Chips To Military

Stephanie McCloskey is in about as much processor-related trouble as you can get, having netted major bucks by selling counterfeit chips to the military. The Chinese fakes were so shoddy that her company had to clean them off with erasers.

The military often frets that Chinese components aren’t up to snuff – or, worse, might have hardware backdoors built in, allowing for sabotage. But it seems like these chips were mostly just pieces of crap – as mentioned, they arrived in the US covered in dirt and grime. Crap or no crap, Stephanie faces up to five years and prison and a $US250,000 fine for her hardware trickery. Oh, and she’s going to return her $US166,000 salary, which still sort of seems like peanuts, given her counterfeit operation netted $US15.9 million. [The Register]

Photo by Uwe Hermann