HTC phone designers arrested for stealing trade secrets and fraudulent expense charges

HTC seriously cannot catch a break. News broke recently that several high level designers from within the company were arrested and interrogated for fraudulent spending and stealing trade secrets. Vice President of Product Design Thomas Chien, R&D director Wu Chien Hung, and the guy personally responsible for sketching the One's design, Justin Huang, were some of the big names involved in the scandal. HTC chairwoman Cher Wang found out that those three employees were planning on leaving HTC to start a new design company, “Xiaoyu,” which has already been trademarked in China by the three. Of course, they weren't planning on leaving HTC until receiving their mid-year bonus checks. Ouch.

Of course, leaving a company isn't illegal. But what really set HTC off what that Thomas Chien was allegedly caught downloading some files pertaining to Sense 6.0 (which HTC declined to comment on) and then emailing those files to a third party. I would think most people would be smart enough to know not to do anything incriminating over something as easily monitored as email, but what do I know?

During the investigation, some fraud came up. Supposedly, those three big names used an external design firm to invoice HTC $334,000 bucks in commission for the design of the HTC One, despite the fact that it was done in house. They then split the commission among themselves.

This is definitely a pretty bleak turn of events for HTC, but they've weathered the storm decently up until now. Hopefully this won't be anything than a bump in the road for the company.

source: Engadget