Fromhoming pigeonsandinvisible semen ink , we turn to business undercover agent . Trade arcanum are just that , secrets , and they ’ve been the target of spying even before the industrial revolution . Take , for example , the silk diligence . Until the 6th century , only the Chinese jazz how to make it . Yes , I ’m go to say it in good order here on mental_floss : It was a tangible " ancient Formosan mystery . " At least until convoluted emperor Justinian I stole the clandestine recipe . How did he do it ? Well , he get two monastic to smuggle silkworms out of China in vacuous canes .
These day , one of the most common forms of industrial espionage is for confide employees to quit and join a competitor , taking the secrets with them .
GM suspected Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua of doing this when he bequeath to link Volkswagen . GM claimed that de Arriortua slip thousands of photographs with plans of the Opel Vectra , which was then secret . The case , which was finally settle in 1997 , resulted in one of the large settlements in the history of industrial espionage , with Volkswagen agree to bear General Motors $ 100 million and to buy at least $ 1 billion of railcar parts from the company over 7 years , although it did not explicitly apologize de Arriortua !
In another interesting and well - documented case , the FBI caught a computer railroad engineer name Kenji Hayashi with underground IBM platter drive details . His employer , Hitachi , gave Hayashi more than $ 500,000 to grease one’s palms IBM employee . After Hayashi was apprehend , he had to devote IBM 60 times this total in recompense . Booyah !
Here ’s another fib I particularly care : An industrial spy at GE named Chien Ming Sung earn $ 1 million a year for pass along secrets of synthetic baseball diamond manufacture to a South Korean company . By stealing the noesis they needed to build a industrial plant , the Koreans avoided pay off permit fee for the technology . GE discovered the espionage in 1992 and estimated the larceny to be worth $ 500 million annually in future sales . Sung ’s career was brought to a halt as the solvent of an investigating of his activities to enrol a GE technician , who reported the suspicious contact to company protection officials , giving new meaning to " It ai n’t over until Sung sings . "
