China spy kills Zoom meets in U.S.: charge
A Zoom employee shut down numerous video meetings taking place in the U.S. commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre at the direction of the Chinese government, a source familiar with the new criminal case said Friday.
Xinjiang Jin “terminated at least four video meetings” on Zoom that were to acknowledge the
31st anniversary of the 1989 Beijing student-led protests, where hundreds of people were killed in the square and surrounding areas by the Chinese army, sources said.
Jin (photo) — who is located in China — worked with officials in the Chinese Communist Party to disrupt the U.S.-based meetings about the massacre, according to the complaint unsealed Friday in Brooklyn Federal Court.
While the feds did not identify the company that Jin worked for, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed to the Daily News that he was a Zoom employee.
Jin was able to shut the meetings down by falsely claiming that they were violating the company’s Terms of Service, the federal investigators said.
Jin also shut down meetings regularly within China on behalf of the Chinese government, and sometimes gave the personal information of Zoom users outside the country to officials of the Chinese government, according to federal prosecutors.
Jin and others created fake email accounts and made up lies about some of the users, said the feds.
“The fabricated evidence falsely asserted that the meetings included discussions of child abuse or exploitation, terrorism, racism or incitements to violence, and sometimes included screenshots of the purported participants’ user profiles featuring, for example, a masked person holding a flag resembling that of the Islamic State terrorist group,” the feds said in a press release.
Jin, 39, lives in China, and has not been arrested in the case.