(JustPatriots.com)- The CEO of a software company in Michigan has been arrested after prosecutors in Los Angeles County accused him of compromising personal information for hundreds of employees at the county elections office.
Earlier this week, 51-year-old Eugene Yu was arrested near Lansing, Michigan. George Gascon, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, alleged that Yu stored this personal information improperly on servers that were based in China.
Yu serves as the CEO of Konnech, a small software company located in Michigan. According to Gascon, the defendant will be extradited from Michigan to Los Angeles.
Back in 2020, Los Angeles County chose Konnech for a contract. The company was supposed to store all data for employee scheduling and payroll using its software called PollChief. The contract, stretching over five years with a value of almost $3 million, stated that Konnech wasn’t allowed to store this information anywhere outside the United States, according to Gascon.
As the district attorney explained:
“Konnech allegedly violated its contract by storing critical information that the workers provided on servers in China. We intend to hold all those responsible for this breach accountable.”
Gascon added that the actions taken by Yu didn’t compromise the integrity of any election. He also said it doesn’t look like the information that was improperly stored on the China servers was sold.
Gascon said that investigators in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office discovered this breach earlier in 2022, through their work on another investigation. He didn’t mention what that investigation was, or the exact date when they first became aware of this problem.
A day before Yu was arrested, The New York Times published a report that said Konnech had recently been the target of conspiracy theorists who were attacking the company about its role in the 2020 presidential election.
The Times’ report said that the election deniers were claiming Yu’s company had direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party. They also said the company allowed the government in China to access the personal information for 2 million poll workers. There wasn’t any evidence to back up these claims, though.
As a result of these conspiracy theories, employees at Konnech started getting death threats. But, when he spoke with The Times, Yu denied that the company had done anything wrong.
He even went as far as saying that all of the information that Konnech had was stored on servers based in America. The Times reported that Yu, who immigrated in 1986 to the U.S., had to go into hiding due to all of the death threats against him.
As Yu told The Times in an email about going into hiding:
“I’ve cried. Other than the birth of my daughter, I hadn’t cried since kindergarten.”
Due to all the backlash with the conspiracy theorists, Konnech went out and hired crisis management and public relations firm, Reputation Architects, to help them get through the ordeal.
Now, the company may have some more crisis management to deal with after its CEO was arrested.
