New York Daily News

China spy kills Zoom meets in U.S.: charge

- BY NOAH GOLDBERG

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.

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