Two Google engineers and one of their husbands have been indicted in the US for allegedly stealing trade secrets from search engines and other technology companies and transferring information to unauthorized locations, including Iran.
Samaneh Ghandali, 41, along with her husband Mohammadjavad Khosravi (aka Mohammad Khosravi), 40, and her sister Soroor Ghandali, 32, are accused of conspiring to steal secrets from Google and other leading technology companies, stealing and attempting to steal trade secrets, and obstructing law enforcement.
The three defendants, all of Iranian descent who live in San Jose, were arrested Thursday and made their first appearance in a California district court.
According to the US Department of Justice (DoJ), the Ghandali sisters worked at Google before joining another technology company identified as Company 3. Khosravi was allegedly employed by a different company (named Company 2). All three found jobs in the area of computer processors.
“As part of the alleged theft of privacy, the defendants used their employment to obtain confidential and sensitive information,” the DoJ said in a press release.
“Defendants then leaked confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies, from Google and other technology companies to unauthorized third-party and personal sites, including to operating devices related to each other’s employers, and to Iran.”
In a statement shared with Bloomberg, a Google spokesperson said the company has developed safeguards to protect its confidential information and notified law enforcement immediately after discovering the incident. The trade secrets concern the company’s Tensor processor for Pixel phones.
Samaneh Ghandali, according to each department, transferred hundreds of files, including Google’s trade secrets, to third-party social media, mostly to channels that had the defendant’s first name. Soroor Ghandali is also accused of releasing a number of files related to Google, containing trade secrets, to the same channels while working for the company.
The trade secret files were then copied to different personal devices, along with a work tool belonging to Khosravi and a work tool provided to Soroor Ghandali by Company 3. The defendants then concealed their actions by submitting false, signed affidavits; destroy files extracted from electronic devices; and we manually took screenshots containing the content of the documents instead of transferring the documents using a messaging application.
“After Google’s internal security systems discovered Samaneh Ghandali’s work and Google revoked his access to company services in August 2023, Samaneh Ghandali allegedly executed a signed affidavit saying he did not share Google’s confidential information with anyone outside the company,” the DoJ said.
In addition, Samaneh Ghandali and Khosravi conducted internet searches and visited websites about de-linking and other information. This includes questions related to the amount of time the cell service provider stored “messages to be printed for the court.”
Meanwhile, the pair allegedly continued to access Google’s trade secrets stored on their personal devices for the purpose of manually capturing hundreds of computer screens of sensitive Google and Company 2 information for an unspecified period of time spanning months.
Samaneh Ghandali is also alleged to have personally taken about 24 photos of Khosravi’s computer screen containing Company 2’s confidential information with his cell phone the night before the couple visited Iran in December 2023. These photos were later found on a personal device associated with Samaneh Ghandali in Iran.
If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each conspiracy count and a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the obstruction of justice count.
The development comes less than a month after another former Google engineer, Linwei Ding, was convicted in the US of stealing thousands of confidential company documents to build a startup in China.
