When Larry Chalfan was awakened by the telephone at 3.40 one Saturday morning last October, he knew something was wrong. But he was still shocked when the caller described how five robbers armed with revolvers and automatic rifles had broken into the semiconductor factory he manages in the quiet suburbs of Portland, Oregon. The thieves attacked the security guard, and then tied, gagged and blindfolded 12 employees working the night shift before making off with several hundred thousand computer chips.

That morning Oki Semiconductor became another victim of what is being dubbed the 'crime of the 1990s' - computer chip theft. Oki Semiconductor is a subsidiary of Japan's Oki Electric Industry company, and Chalfan's plant in Portland makes the 1 megabit and 4 megabit dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips used to store the programs running on a personal computer. The thieves had got away with $2 million worth of ...

Courtesy Computer Crime