A former Unisys Corp. employee has been sentenced to 39 months in prison and fined $5,000 for stealing computer equipment and programs.
Darian Lyons, 32, who has prior convictions in Utah and Minnesota, faced 33 to 41 months imprisonment under federal sentencing guidelines."You're a comparatively young man, there's almost anything you can pursue," U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins told Lyons Tuesday.
Lyons said drinking and marital problems provoked the theft of Unisys hardware and software.
Federal prosecutors depicted the crime as a calculated, methodical plan.
According to the FBI, Lyons, while working for Unisys, was sent to the company's branch in England. Before that one-year stint was up, he mailed to a friend in Salt Lake City six boxes of computers, disks, memory chips, hard drives and other computer gear.
He also told friends he wanted to steal a complete Unisys system before leaving the company. Unisys reported 11 thefts from its Salt Lake offices - all equipment compatible with the goods in the unauthorized shipment from England.
He then obtained secret Unisys computer access codes.
"This would enable him to modify, distribute and sell services based on Unisys operating systems for Unisys computers," the FBI said. "Lyons could sell these services or the source code to competitors of Unisys."
After he used the confidential access codes to send messages from his new home in Massachusetts to Unisys employees in Salt Lake City, the FBI moved in - finding Lyons by using the phone number he left with the messages he sent.