‘Wheelchair employee stole 8474 smartphones from Samsung headquarters’

A disabled employee of Samsung Electronics in South Korea who is in a wheelchair has been arrested for stealing a total of 8,474 smartphones over a two-year period. The South Korean police made the announcement on Wednesday.

South Korean website The Investor reports that the suspect stole the smartphones from Samsung’s headquarters in the city of Suwon between December 2014 and November 2016, according to police. He would have sold the phones to a second-hand phone seller and received about 633,000 euros for it. The suspect would have used this amount to pay off an even higher gambling debt.

The suspect ended up with Samsung in 2010. The South Korean electronics giant then offered jobs to people with disabilities. The arrested, disabled man worked in a maintenance department where old phones were used by developers to study upgrades and test new features. These phones were not intended for sale.

All Samsung employees have to go through a body scanner before they leave the office, but that did not apply to the suspect. He was allowed to pass the security check with his electric wheelchair. This allowed him to steal the phones undetected. Samsung filed a police report in December 2016 when some of the old phones turned up in Vietnam.