The source said Liu was apprehended at Bangor International Airport (BIA) trying to catch a flight back to China, though the court records do not confirm the nature of his apprehension. - https://www.themainewire.com/2026/09/chinese-national-accuse...

Oddly the Tom's Hardware article, authored by "Zhiye Liu", omits this. But it's not really relevant - I'm sure there are lots of people with names like "Steve Robinson" or "John Wayne" in supervisory roles at China's CBP-equivalent, and staffing their news media.

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.

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.

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

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".