US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs

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LLevitating about 12 hours ago 104 commentsRead Article on tomshardware.com

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pushcx•about 12 hours ago

Many years ago, I arrived to my half-height cubicle at a Fortune 100 company to see that my desktop PC case was ajar. I set the CRT aside, opened it, and realized that the RAM had been removed. My neighbor explained what must have happened: another employee must have needed to double their RAM from 8 to 16 MB. Requisitioning an upgrade was a weeks-long bureaucratic process that required approval by one's manager and IT, perhaps prompting a review of per-team resource allocation. Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

saghm•about 11 hours ago

Sounds like the neighbor could have just taken the RAM from their own computer out and claimed someone stole it and then called IT to provide them with replacement and then opened it back to and put theirs in. Seems pretty selfish to disrupt someone else's day for this instead of your own; they could have gotten back up and running before you did since they could have put in a help desk ticket before you even got in.

polyterative•about 10 hours ago

I like the way you think.

peddling-brink•about 11 hours ago

Was this explanation given with a wink and a nod, or did your neighbor always have 16MB of RAM?

PorciiVorbesc•about 10 hours ago

>Repairing a broken PC was a trivial help desk ticket; my PC was restored in an hour or two.

Except that even IT would know that a missing 8MB RAM stick is not a defect, it's (petit) theft.

Defect is when that 8MB stick would be ... defective.

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

Reminds me of the kids in my high school who stole individual 4MB 72-pin SIMMs out of a bunch of computer lab desktop PCs to upgrade their approximately equivalent generation motherboard/CPU home systems to whatever was their max capacity, in an era when a 16MB RAM desktop PC was a high performer. Shortly after all the PCs got locks on them.

Scoundreller•about 9 hours ago

then they learned how to pick/shim locks

dylan604•about 10 hours ago

Was this before IT had the ability to look at all of the machines to see which suddenly had a different RAM config?

hypercube33•about 10 hours ago

I've worked at a bunch of orgs and no one is bothering to look at ram size changes they just note what it's at when they get a call.

3eb7988a1663•about 10 hours ago

IT tech was probably the one who suggested the approach.

gpm•about 10 hours ago

> from 8 to 16 MB

Yes

dylan604•about 10 hours ago

Yeah, I've never been in IT, so I didn't know when tools were available to remote into nodes on the network. The low RAM sizes was precisely what led me to ask

muragekibicho•about 10 hours ago

Selling 105,800$ worth of compute for 39*200=7800$ is similar to theft I've only encountered in the third world.

My boiler's copper water supply lines were vandalized for scrap. Their total value was 1540$ but the thief sold the copper for a grand total of 20$. The police and I went to the local scrap market, asked for anyone with a great deal on copper supply lines, and the perp was caught.

thenthenthen•about 10 hours ago

Not only in the third world i would say?

avadodin•about 3 hours ago

I thought this would be about GPUs.

Corporate computers often have a 4 or 8 GB VRAM brand GPU that sits idle only running the desktop animations. If you have an HDMI port for the iGPU or however the monitor connection for laptops work, it is almost a victimless crime.

Maybe even one stick of ram in two stick setups.

If you steal the CPU yeah someone is bound to notice even if it is an atom.

2b3a51•about 10 hours ago

Hang on, 105 800 / 46 = $2300 per machine. Good heavens, when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box. Have prices really gone up that much in a decade or so, or is this some maximalist prosecution claim?

RAM thefts: Birmingham UK, Jewellery Quarter, St Paul's Square. Some may remember the solicitor's office on the corner that had 'RAM removed from PCs overnight' etched on the street level windows pre-millenium. Has been converted into posh flats now.

PorciiVorbesc•about 9 hours ago

>when I was partially responsible for hardware refreshes in a UK public sector organisation with around a thousand endpoint PCs we budgeted something like £600 a box.

Same here in EU mainland, at every org I worked we used to get budget notebooks to do SW dev on, also in the 600-800 Euro range.

I think because the US is so much wealthier and can afford to spend more on tech without breaking a sweat. Hence the "Europoor" meme where Europeans can't comprehend the material abundance and spending power of the US.

1970-01-01•about 11 hours ago

Bured lede: i7 CPUs for border patrol.. why?

kube-system•about 11 hours ago

For the same reasons fortune 500s will spec the same for their office workers. Labor is expensive compared to hardware. It is often cheaper to spend a little bit more on hardware to avoid supporting multiple configuration, exceptions, more frequent updates, support tickets from power users, etc

If you pinch pennies buying a spec that exactly meets today’s needs, and next year MS Teams releases a new update that requires more resources, you don’t want to buy a whole building full of new computers.

nortlov•about 10 hours ago

Border Patrol’s IT department more forward looking than the rest of the government..? sign me up! I’ve been using the same laptop for nearly 5 years now. It’s painfully slow and does not meet the needs of the latest Teams updates.

formerly_proven•about 10 hours ago

You seem to live in a bit of a bubble, personally I've never seen anything other than penny-pinching on corporate laptops and everybody everywhere complaining about the same.

(I don't mean that IT departments hand out bottom-of-the-barrel plastic laptops which break every five minutes, but rather fairly low-spec Thinkpad/HP/Dell business laptops with just enough RAM that their bloated Windows 11 installs are barely not swapping when idle and just enough SSD space that Windows Update doesn't fail)

theandrewbailey•about 10 hours ago

I work in e-waste recycling. Most of the PCs and laptops I see are corporate IT decommissions. Most of those have i5 CPUs, and only a handful are i7. Few are cruel enough to afflict their wage slaves with an i3 or less.

kube-system•about 10 hours ago

Poorly run IT organizations certainly exist, even in F500. I’m telling you why it’s done, not that it universally is.

goku_vegeta•about 11 hours ago

i7 CPUs have been used for all sorts of PC configurations. Your standard library at a university or college, the office worker desktop who does nothing but use web based applications for their job, and so on.

The pricing difference between an i5 and an i7 aren't really that big when you go to Dell and tell them I need 4,000 desktops. DHS isn't paying the same pricing difference as we would be when purchasing a boxed CPU.

Ekaros•about 10 hours ago

At certain point people just don't care about saving money. You get a budget and then get quotes and pick one that matches what you are allowed to spend. If there is multiple with same spend go for one with bigger numbers.

akerl_•about 11 hours ago

At a certain scale, the relative complexity (both in terms of inventory management and dealing with upgrade requests / approvals / etc) tends itself towards picking a baseline spec that can work for the overwhelming majority of your fleet.

phendrenad2•about 9 hours ago

Isn't Palantir a webapp? Full of maps and lists of stuff? Seems like a recipe for "chrome has stopped responding..."

tomasphan•about 10 hours ago

Because it runs Windows hehe

arcfour•about 11 hours ago

It's just a typical enterprise PC configuration. Probably because nobody writes efficient software these days.

hypercube33•about 9 hours ago

45 security apps cut the ram and CPU performance in half out of the gate, then you have Win11 with its web gui and users who complain about any slowness so i7 or r7 is about the norm most places / bulk big 3 oems make for business.

taf2•about 11 hours ago

I remember my parents working for a company in the 90s and the mailroom was one the most common places things went missing… aka theft. I recall my mom had her purse stolen at her cube… theft from within similar to security exploits from within seem to be the most real security vulnerability to be focused on. That sshd that can only be accessed from a few specific ips with the right port knocking is not how you get hacked… at least not normally

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

If you've ever driven through the land crossing border in either direction at Calais, Maine (and St. Stephen, NB), they're both really tiny and sleepy places. It's astonishing to think that he wouldn't get caught. Like, you cripple the PCs of a place where your colleagues use them on a day to day basis and think nobody is going to notice? Real genius move there, bud.

hammock•about 11 hours ago

The border guys are there are really aggressive too. I canoed the st croix up around there and you are warned not to paddle north of the halfway line in the middle of the river… agents will literally pop out of the woods and start reproaching you

geetee•about 12 hours ago

Why in the world is U.S. Customs and Border Protection hiring foreign nationals?

walrus01•about 12 hours ago

I'm fairly sure you need to at least be a Permanent Resident to get hired, which makes you a US Person (it's a distinct legal definition). Permanent residents are also able to join the military and have been able to do so for a long time. There's enough of them that during the peak of the Iraq War they even held in-country citizenship ceremonies at major bases for people who had filed and completed their citizenship paperwork.

thatfrenchguy•about 11 hours ago

US person is a tax definition, folks without permanent residency that meet the substantial presence test are also US people. For immigration purposes you use resident alien / nonresident alien.

lightedman•about 10 hours ago

US Person is not a tax definition, it is a security definition. holds up access badge with US Person written on it Taxes do not care if you're an American or not, you're still paying them.

jeffbee•about 12 hours ago

For the same reason that foreign nationals can join the military, including the Coast Guard that has an overlapping mission: it's a nation of immigrants and for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

like_any_other•about 11 hours ago

> for centuries until very recently most Americans readily recognized the value and necessity of recruiting foreign people into various posts.

You forgot to mention that, for those centuries, US immigration was effectively whites-only, until the 1965 Hart-Celler act (that politicians promised wouldn't change this!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart-Celler_Act

Brybry•about 10 hours ago

I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]

However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]

Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.

But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...

[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...

walrus01•about 11 hours ago

And in the same era in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Immigration_Act,_1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_head_tax

parineum•about 9 hours ago

You forgot to mention that those people weren't considered "white" at the time.

jeffbee•about 11 hours ago

Lol no. For almost the entire 20th century, until 1992, Filipinos could just join the Navy or Coast Guard at foreign recruiting posts, without even being American residents, then get fast-tracked for citizenship.

wat10000•about 11 hours ago

Why is this so important to mention here?

stephenlf•about 11 hours ago

Robin Hood?

arjie•about 10 hours ago

[deleted unsubstantiated text]

sdenton4•about 10 hours ago

This does not appear anywhere in this article. Just sowing misinformation?

arjie•about 9 hours ago

Hmm, I just googled and used what I thought was a local newspaper https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...

But you’re right. That’s poor reasoning because this kind of thing is easy to create fake news around. I’ll delete original. I shouldn’t have relied on it.

sva_•about 8 hours ago

> One camera recording showed Liu using a screwdriver to scrape thermal paste off a processor

Double crime

londons_explore•about 11 hours ago

And how much did this investigation cost, when you account for all the hours spent by investigators, lawers, judges, etc?

My guess is it was a huge net loss for the taxpayer.

The more effective move for the nation would have been for this guys boss to have confronted him and said "computer parts keep going missing on your shift. You have 2 weeks to make sure all the computers are back to their exact original config or we're gonna investigate and you could end up in prison".

genidoi•about 11 hours ago

It’s obviously not about the cost of the parts, there just can’t be any tolerance for criminal conduct in government agency employees.

trebligdivad•about 10 hours ago

IMHO a bigger worry is if they were opening the case then they could have modified it for spying or changing contents. I'd have thought stuff like this should have case alarm notification and inventory change alerts.

toss1•about 11 hours ago

Sure, that'd be more "cost efficient", and for a small one-off, probably better. But law enforcement and justice is not a profit center.

Merely making the threats like you specify and even having it restored encourages more crime by making the crime effectively zero-risk — either he gets away with it, or simply needs to restore things to the way they were and the only cost to the criminal is the wasted effort. Makes it so crime pays.

And no, the investigation of watching a bunch of videos to observe the perp opening the computer cases, and writing up a complaint, is probably lower cost than the multiple thefts.