WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th March, 2021) Former US State Department employee Gene Leroy Thompson Jr. has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release for trafficking counterfeit goods while working at the US Embassy in Seoul, the Department of Justice said in a release.
"A former US Department of State employee and his spouse were sentenced today for their roles in a conspiracy to traffic hundreds of thousands of Dollars in counterfeit goods through e-commerce accounts operated from State Department computers at the US Embassy in Seoul, Republic of Korea," the release said on Thursday.
The Justice Department said Thomson Jr. served as an Information Programs Officer and used his office computer to create multiple e-commerce accounts to sell counterfeit goods between September 2017 and December 2019.
Thomson Jr.'s wife, Guajiao Zhang, was responsible for the accounts' operation as well as with communicating with customers and purchasing merchandise to be stored in the District of Oregon from where items were sent to byers across the United States, the release said.
Zhang was sentenced to three years of supervised release with the first eight months consisting of home confinement, the release added.
Both defendants will also pay a penalty in the amount of $229,302., according to the release.
