Authorities are now investigating the involvement of underground counterfeit criminals on the alleged suicide of a 25-year-old Chinese factory worker who was accused of stealing prototypes of heavily guarded Apple iPhone, which were now, reported missing.
Police earlier found the lifeless body of Sun Danyong, a contracted worker for Foxconn International in Dongguan, inside his apartment.
However, the investigators failed to recover the 16 prototype iPhones, leading to the suspicion that a notorious counterfeit gang in China was involved.
Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, said that Danyong was the one who slipped the fourth generation iPhone out of its heavily secured laboratory to be sold to Shenzhen’s notoriously entrepreneurial counterfeiters.
Control Risks, a corporate probe consulting firm, said that the incident was nothing new to the IT industry, saying that most of the incidents happened less than one day.
“These people don’t necessary steal the new product prototypes. They just borrow it for a day or less maybe, then bring it back to avoid suspicion from the company,” CR regional general manager Dane Chamorro said.
Foxconn is one of the main cellphone manufacturers for brands like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola.
Earlier reports quoting Foxconn General Manager for China told that Sun Danyong were already caught of “losing” products for several times but was able to retrieve it the next day.
It will be recalled that China was already blacklisted by several brands for its massive counterfeiting operations. The new fourth generation iPhone was not the fist Apple phone counterfeited in the country, where the first fake copies of the first generations of the Apple cellphone was a big hit.
Other cellphone makers like Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung suffered similar fate as the iPhone models.
Based on documents from the US Customs and Border Protection Unit, some 79 percent of seized counterfeit products and other goods came from China. Authorities said that the value of the said fake goods ranges from $200 to $350 million.
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