The FBI has arrested and charged Terry "Jiajia" Liu, a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) supervisor at the Calais port of entry in Maine, with stealing and damaging government property. Prosecutors allege Liu removed Intel 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh processors, memory modules and hard drives from at least 46 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) computers at three Maine border facilities and replaced them with lower-performance parts. IThome reports the case, citing The Maine Wire.
Raptor Lake Refresh is the family Intel sold as its 14th-generation desktop Core processors, and the affected machines were Core i7 desktops used by the border agency. Investigators said some of the swapped machines were later found with far older hardware installed, in several cases downgraded to Pentium chips, and others had memory and storage capacity cut back compared with their original configurations.
How the swaps were caught
Liu's job was limited to IT support, and he had no authority to modify government computers. The port director, Theodore Cummings, had issued a written order spelling out that restriction: 'Do not move any computer or computer component.' Covert surveillance cameras nevertheless captured Liu working during midnight shifts - moving machines into a training room, scraping thermal paste off processors with a screwdriver before installing replacement chips, and sliding removed memory modules into his desk drawer.
Instead of selling the stolen hardware on the open market, Liu converted it into store credit through Newegg's trade-in program, which accepts used components and pays out in credit - a route investigators said was less likely to attract attention. Thirteen emails sent between Liu's personal account and his official customs mailbox carried shipping labels and trade-in receipts matching the processor models missing from the government machines. Newegg was offering between $200 and $210 (about 1,420 to 1,491 yuan) per processor, and transaction records show Liu submitted Core i7 Raptor Lake Refresh chips for trade-in 16 times between May 2025 and July 2026.
His American Express account records also show three $200 (about 1,420 yuan) store-credit deposits from Newegg. Under questioning, Liu admitted buying cheaper parts from Amazon and Newegg to replace the government components and admitted submitting the government-owned parts for trade-in. He first claimed his goal was to improve performance and shorten repair times, but later acknowledged the computers actually ran worse after his changes.
The bill for 46 compromised computers
The inventory of damage is precise: of the 46 machines, 39 had processors swapped, six had memory replaced and eight had different hard drives installed - totals that imply some computers were hit more than once.
Recovering the stolen hardware cost about $20,460 (about 145,300 yuan). Replacing all 46 tampered computers with equivalent-spec hardware is estimated at about $105,800 (about 751,200 yuan), before the additional labour of configuring each machine with government-standard systems, which would push the total higher.
The case shows how trade-in programs, convenient for consumers upgrading their own machines, can also act as a low-visibility channel for stolen parts. For organisations running fleets of identical desktops, it took physical audits and a camera in the training room to catch the difference.
