The US has arrested three engineers in Silicon Valley for allegedly stealing trade secrets from companies, including Google, and transferring the data to Iran.

The San Jose-based engineers—41-year-old Samaneh Ghandali; her husband, 40-year-old Mohammad Khosravi; and her sister, 32-year-old Soroor Ghandali—originally came to the US from Iran and secured jobs at “leading technology companies in the area of mobile computer processors,” the Justice Department said on Thursday.

The Justice Department says the two Ghandali sisters previously had jobs at Google before joining an unidentified tech company. This was possibly Intel since the indictment mentions the two later worked at a “Santa Clara, California” company involved in PCs, servers, tablets, phones, automobiles, and medical device tech. A LinkedIn page for Soroor Ghandali also lists her as a graphics hardware engineer at Intel.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Khosravi worked at a separate company, which appears to be Qualcomm, according to a LinkedIn page with his name. A court document also indicates that he stole trade secrets about the company’s Snapdragon processors, only for Qualcomm to terminate his employment in August 2025.

All three suspects were arrested on Thursday and brought before a federal court in San Jose that day. A federal grand jury indicted them on both trade secret theft charges and for obstructing justice.

The US alleges the trio transferred "confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies" to a third-party communication platform based outside the US. It appears that Google detected Soroor Ghandali downloading "internal Google files to a personal USB drive" as early as June 2022.

Court documents indicate some of the stolen trade secrets involve Google’s Tensor processors used in the company’s Pixel smartphones, including the “architecture and design specifications pertaining to hardware security and cryptography.” Technical details of the chip components, including the machine learning accelerator, were also lifted.

Google flagged the unauthorized file transfers and revoked Samaneh Ghandali’s access in August 2023, before firing her about a month later. However, she and her husband continued to manually photograph company trade secrets stored on their personal devices. This included saving the photos on a mobile phone before they traveled to Iran in December 2023.

The suspects face the prospect of decades in prison if convicted on all charges. The Justice Department noted the maximum sentence is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft. The maximum sentence for the obstruction of justice is 20 years in prison.

The indictment adds that Samaneh Ghandali became a US citizen in 2018, while her sister arrived in the US on a non-immigrant student visa. The husband became a US legal permanent resident around 2019.

By: DocMemory
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