An electric vehicle charging company has sued three King County residents and 50 co-conspirators for allegedly running schemes to steal and resell scrap metal stripped from the company’s stations in the Seattle area and pilfering its trade secrets.
One man is accused of using bolt cutters to cut off charging cords and breaking into charging equipment cabinets to steal metal from inside, then reselling the materials to salvage shops.
Two other men are accused of opening a station’s key box using a secret combination, enabling co-conspirators to unlock the station’s cabinets and photograph and take notes on its interior, according to the complaint filed by Virginia-based Electrify America LLC.
The charging station company filed the complaint in federal court in Seattle on April 10. The company is seeking $500,000 from the three King County residents for allegedly running schemes that violated the state’s criminal profiteering act.
“While we are not in a position to comment on any specific pending legal actions, Electrify America will pursue all available options to protect our essential infrastructure assets,” the company said in a statement Friday.
The three men did not have attorneys listed in federal court records. It is unclear whether they are also facing criminal charges.
“Electrify’s efforts to deliver this essential infrastructure to all Americans has been challenged by criminals,” the company said in the complaint.
The company in its complaint said it started noticing an uptick in people stealing its charging cables and other pieces of equipment from its stations last June.
About one month later, the company said it saw “strange activities” at some of its charging stations in King County.
One of the men was allegedly the leader of a group that would sell the materials to metal salvage shops whose owners were aware the scraps were stolen, according to the complaint.
One of the other men appeared on surveillance camera footage in August, parking a car owned by the third co-defendant at a charging station in Seattle’s University Village shopping center, where he allegedly used a secret combination to open a key box attached to one of the station’s cabinets. The complaint does not say how he knew the combination.
The man allegedly left the key box open so that a co-conspirator could use the keys inside to unlock the station’s cabinets two days later. Either he or the other schemer allegedly cut the surveillance camera’s feeds to obscure what they did next, the complaint states.
A similar incident unfolded in February, when the man allegedly took the keys from the charging station’s key box and copied them so they could be used by his co-conspirators. Hours later, another person was seen using an illegally copied key to open the station’s cabinet, taking photos of equipment inside and writing down notes about the equipment, according to the complaint.
The company accused the three men of trespassing and violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — two for profiting from stolen trade secrets and one for profiting from stolen property, the complaint states.
