A Johnson County man who worked as an information technology administrator for a stainless steel fabrication company in Brown County is facing prison time. Josh J. Minkler, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana announced Wednesday that 34-year-old Benjamin Levi Cox, of Nineveh, pleaded guilty to one count of Wire Fraud and one count of Interception of Electronic Communications and sentenced to eight months in prison. In addition to his prison term, Cox was ordered to serve seven months of home confinement, two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $27,490 in restitution. He was also ordered to perform a further six months of unpaid community service.
Federal prosecutors say that Cox was formerly employed by Electric Metal Fab, Inc., a stainless steel fabrication company in Nashville. Cox worked as the company’s IT system administrator and a designer for its computer-aided drafting system, which is used to custom design products. Around March of 2013, authorities say that Cox began covertly copying the company’s entire computer system to an external hard drive. Over a period of three months, Cox apparently loaded all of EMF’s proprietary digital information, including thousands of files containing its CAD designs, financial data, sensitive personnel records, and operational and technical documents onto this external device.
As part of his plea, Cox admitted that when he resigned from EMF in June 2013, he took the hard drive containing the stolen EMF data and brought it with him to his new employer, a direct competitor of EMF. Cox then copied multiple files to the new employer’s system and altered the CAD designs to appear as if they had been created by the competitor. The doctored CAD designs were subsequently used by the competitor in obtaining over $45,000 in new contracts with customers that had previously been EMF clients.
Prosecutor’s say that Cox further admitted that before quitting EMF, he used his system administrator privileges to secretly configure EMF’s email account settings to auto-forward all of its email communications to two external email accounts he had registered. The intercepted emails included personal correspondence, private financial and legal information, and business dealings between EMF and its clients. After being questioned by investigators, Cox secretly deleted the contents of those email accounts to obstruct the investigation.
“Companies have the right to keep their proprietary interests out of the hands of competitors,” said Minkler. “Those who choose to steal from their employer and then attempt to obstruct a criminal investigation will be held accountable.”
The Cybercrime and High Technology Section of the Indiana State Police and U.S. Secret Service investigated the case, with assistance from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.