Ex-IBM employee from China gets five years prison for stealing code

A former software engineer for IBM in China was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to stealing proprietary source code from the company, prosecutors announced on Friday. Jiaqiang Xu, 32, was sentenced on Thursday by US District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains, New York, according to a statement from the office of US Attorney Geoffrey Berman. Xu pleaded guilty in May 2017 to economic espionage and theft of a trade secret.
Leanne Marek, Xu's attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Xu worked as a systems software developer for International Business Machines Corp from 2010 to 2014, according to a public LinkedIn profile. The company was not identified by name in court documents, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Xu was arrested in December 2015 after meeting with an undercover officer at a White Plains hotel, where authorities said he was recorded saying he used proprietary IBM code to make software to sell to customers, according to prosecutors.