In a historic event of cybercrime busting, US officials arrested an operator of a website called crack99.com for selling pirated software worldwide. The owner of the website was a Chinese national and he specialized in selling far more specialized software than Photoshop or Windows Operating System. The 36-year old Chinese man named Li Xiang is a resident of Chengdu, China and has been convicted of criminal copyright infringement and committing wire fraud, as reported by a statement from ICE or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Li used crack99.com to sell pirated software worth more than USD 100 million. This revenue mark was achieved by selling pirated copies of specialized software to just 400 customer in a total of 700 transactions with average selling price for each transaction being $140,000. The software copies sold by Li’s crack99.com either had their licensing file removed or had access control.

Though the software titles sold were not made public by the ICE statement, a glimpse of the nature of the software sold were provided. Li sold pirated software related to manufacturing plant design, storm water management, mathematics, space exploration, mining, manufacturing, intelligence gathering, explosives simulation, engineering, energy, electronics, defense and aerospace design and simulation.

Some customers who bought these pirated software live in countries that are under the U.S. trade embargo. Some other customers were either contractors of U.S. government with security clearance or were agents of foreign governments. ICE reported that using cracked software for working on specialized project can lead to problems because the hackers and crackers might have introduced software back door during the cracking process and that the customers of the pirated software will not receive any security patches from the software developers to correct any security vulnerabilities.

ICE informed that one of the customers of Li was an electronics engineer of NASA who used the purchased pirated software on NASA network for working on a thermal simulation designing project for Huawei Technologies – a Chinese communications manufacturer. ICE reported that another customer of Li was a freelancer. This freelance contractor used the purchased software for designing radar system and Patriot missile components for Black Hawk and Marine One helicopters.

U.S. agents arrested Li in June 2011. Li was lured into a meeting called by the U.S. agents in Saipan. Li was made to believe that he was pinning down a business deal of 20 Gigabytes of data with U.S. businessmen representatives. Saipan is a commonwealth of U.S. and thus, U.S. officials had jurisdiction in Saipan. Saipan is an island located in the middle of Pacific Ocean. A series of pirated software purchase by agents from Li’s crack99.com forced ICE to tighten its net around crack99.com in January 2010. After 18 months, Li was lured to Saipan where he was arrested after he delivered the requested software. Li was taken to Delaware where he was sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment in U.S. jail. Li will be handed over to Chinese government once he serves his 12-year imprisonment term.

ICE officials believe that Li Xiang was only a part of a bigger network of Russian and Chinese hackers and pirated software dealers who sell pirated copies of highly specialized and expensive software to business groups and government agents worldwide. ICE said that Li’s sentencing was a major and significant case of uncovering and dismantling one of the most significant copyright infringement cases in the world.