14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports from Korea reveal that a disabled Samsung Electronics employee in a wheelchair was arrested for stealing and selling more than 8,000 smartphones from the office. The employee, named Lee, apparently stole smartphones between December 2014 and November 2016 from Samsung’s headquarters in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province.
Lee stole a total of 8,474 smartphones from Samsung and sold them to a second-hand phone retailer for about $711,743. The phones were intended for developers to test various features and configurations.
As it turns out, Lee got a job at Samsung about seven years ago when the smartphone market started offering positions to people with disabilities. He worked in the department for maintenance of old phones that developers used for testing upgrades or new features.
The former employee didn’t undergo security checks
Every Samsung employee must undergo body scans before leaving the office, but because Lee is bound in a wheelchair, he was allowed to skip the security check. In this way, he was able to remove thousands of smartphones from Samsung’s HQ in the past few years.
The case was first reported in December last year, after Samsung found out that some smartphone units that weren’t intended for sale were distributed in Vietnam. Police officers said that the disabled Samsung employee used the money he obtained from selling the stolen devices to pay off his debt from gambling.
The report didn’t mention which Samsung models were stolen, but the employee most likely got his hands on almost all flagship and premium phones, including the Galaxy Note 7 or last year’s Galaxy S7. Samsung most likely upped its security checks and procedures after this incident, especially since the company is preparing to announce the next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 8.
The successor to last year’s Galaxy Note 7 will arrive later this year, possibly in August, but Samsung has yet to officially announce the unveil date. Information about the upcoming phone has been scarce, as Samsung is focused on keeping the handset's features a secret before it’s officially announced.