U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue announces charges against Aventura Technologies, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The New York company has been charged with illegally importing and selling Chinese-made surveillance and security equipment to U.S. government agencies and private customers. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)A Long Island firm sold tens of millions of dollars in Chinese-made surveillance and other sensitive security equipment to customers, including the U.S. military to use on aircraft carriers, by falsely claiming the goods were manufactured in America, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The fraud that prosecutors allege by Aventura Technologies Inc. raised “a grave concern” over cyber security, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said.
Though there was no allegation of breaches involving the Chinese government, emails and other evidence from the investigation showed “individuals in China were well aware of what was going on,” Donoghue said.
The equipment made in China and sold by Aventura “as purportedly U.S.-made has been installed on dozens of Army, Navy and Air Force bases, Department of Energy facilities and, among other places, on Navy aircraft carriers,” prosecutors said in the criminal complaint. Of the $88 million Aventura made since 2010, $20 million came from federal government contracts promising it would provide only U.S.-made products, they said.
Prosecutors accused the company of a cover-up involving systematically relabeling its merchandise to say it was made at its U.S. plant. It also circulated a photo that an Aventura executive, Jack Cabasso, showed the company’s assembly line, but was actually an image of workers in a Chinese facility, the complaint said.