The Valuable Information Inside of a Coke Can

Corporate espionage and stealing secrets is just one part of the story

Photo by Mahbod Akhzami on Unsplash

Shannon You thought that she would retire from Coca-Cola. As one of the most sought after chemists at the company, she handled a lot of company secrets. But then the higher-ups began to shift their corporate strategy. Eventually, they let her go.

You was stunned,

For the first ten or so years of her career, You worked at DuPont. She started with them in the 1990s. She built a reputation as a chemist who got things done and helped bring in a lot of money for the company.

Then in 2004, she was offered a better position at Cie. de Saint-Gobain.

However, the position with her new firm seemed not to fit well, so she began looking for another job. In 2009, she joined the staff of Honeywell as a material engineer. It was during this time that she began working on abrasion technologies.

Then came her big break.

Her time at Honeywell was short, it lasted just three years. She left them for a role at Coca-Cola. Her role was as a principal engineer. One of the responsibilities for her was to research BPA-free liner formulas for the cans the soda is bottled in.

After You became the contact person for the coating companies, the relationships with Coca-Cola began to cool considerably.

Nearly all the executives that she came into contact with complained that she was rude to them, dismissive of their positions. They told some Coke managers later that she was very aggressive with them.

Akzo Nobel NV’s global technical services manager, Dan Leschnik, told Bloomberg that there was something off about what she was asking for, it was not what most of the people in her position had been asking before.

“She was pushy for additional information, not only down to the component level, but specific amounts of each ingredient.”

You has her defenders. They say she wasn’t being aggressive, rather she was doing exactly what was asked of her. Which some of the people she worked with agreed to but countered that the way she approached things is what made them uncomfortable.

“You’re behind the competition,” You warned at least one executive at a coating company. Though, she offered no example or idea of what that meant.

She would go onto warn whatever executive she was talking to that their company was about to lose the contract. You would tell them that their competition was closer to getting the formula that Coke wanted than they were.

One Way Door

However, You was lying to the executives. Some of her contacts began to theorize that she wasn’t actually wanting to help her employer, but rather had an outside incentive.

One reason was that she began asking them to disclose their formulas.

Executives at the coating companies pushed back. They had never been asked to do this before and were very unsure that it was worth pursuing, even for a huge client like Coca-Cola. Then You asked them to sign one way non-disclosure agreements.

This was not typical practice for anyone involved.

You further alienated people by claiming that she knew more about polymer chemistry than anyone else. Some of the people in her orbit wanted to push back, but were afraid of what she would do if they did.

Tom Mallen, the vice president of vice president for compliance and technology marketing for Sherwin-Williams Co.’s packaging division, testified that You pushed far harder than he was comfortable with.

“… and that we needed to reveal our chemistry to her so that she could know whether the material was going to be worth looking at or not.”

Why did she need to know that?

Mallen began to document interactions with You. He reported that she asked him to give her all the information she asked for and if he refused, she would pull his company’s contract with Coke.

Rather than give her any information, he stopped talking to her.

He wasn’t alone. Mallen and some of his competitors began to compare notes about their interactions with You. While they understood chemistry was her job, this seemed to be much more personal than that.

The solution they came up with was unique and necessary.

Each executive tasked their legal teams with drafting NDAs that were tailored to Shannon You. Once they were signed, she was given the formulas for the chemistry in the can liners.

In accordance with the NDAs, the formulas were stored on her work computer at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. But You intended to move them to her personal computer.

Computing A Heist

In 2017, Coca-Cola brought James Quincey on as the new CEO. His job was to reverse the trend of falling sales and profits. One part of his plan was to lay off more than 1,200 people.

Shannon You was one of those employees who received a pink slip.

On August 8, 2017, she used her badge to get into the headquarters as she always did.

But this was far from a typical day for her.

You was not aware that Coca-Cola had policies in place to prevent terminated employees from stealing their trade secrets. To that end, she used a USB to try to transfer some of the formulas from her work computer on August 8, 2017.

But the transfer did not happen.

She was instructed to transfer the files through a cloud service that Coke approved and had an agreement with called Box Inc. The service was quite busy because of all the employees trying to move files on their last day of work.

And because You was one of only two people in the entire company that knew about the liner formulas, security watched her a bit more closely.

Still, You was undeterred. She attempted to move the files through Microsoft Excel, then onto a thumb drive. But it failed again.

She also attempted to do this with Microsoft Word. As expected, this attempt also did not work.

More than two weeks later, You found a way to get the information. She took pictures of her computer monitor with her phone. She took a long time, opening each and every file.

But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t able to get all the information that she wanted to have.

Finally, a coworker who also lost their job told her that there was a way she could keep everything she wanted. All she had to do was upload everything to a personal Google Drive account.

You listened and began the process of doing that on August 29. The next day, she finished. Coca-Cola’s servers never tried to stop this nor indicated that anything was wrong.

She was not going to be unemployed for long. In fact, she intended to go into business for herself. But couldn’t do that right away, so she made a plan.

First, she took a job at Eastman Chemical. A mistake in the making.

Fraud Grant

You’s original plan was to start her own coating company. She was going to use the secrets that she stole from the companies that were working with Coke. Then she was going to apply for grants from the Chinese government.

Before she was officially laid off, she flew to Weihai. One of the reasons that she went there was to apply for a huge grant, one that would result in millions of dollars for her and her new company.

She also met up with someone who intended to partner with her.

After she was laid off but before she started her new job, she traveled back to China. This time, she was in Beijing. This time, she was applying for the Thousand Talents grant. She told them that she was going to build a BPANI coating production line there and end the “international monopoly.”

However, things were not going as well as she had hoped they would.

To her partners, You complained that she was the one taking on all the risk. That they were doing nothing to help her. And worse of all, in her view, she was not being given anything for her trouble.

Prosecutors shared part of a WeChat exchange that they were able to get ahold of:

“I’m the one taking all the risks in the end, if anything happens to me, the money I’ve made wouldn’t even be enough for the lawyer’s fee.”

Liu Xiangchen, one of You’s business partners, asked her to modify the grant application. Which is what prompted the chemist to lose her cool and start to question whether what she was doing was really going to be worth it.

He asked her to change her photo for the application. Something that seemed easy enough. The goal was to impress Chinese government officials.

Then he asked her to make changes that bordered even further on being criminal.

One of the things that he wanted You to do was get an employment verification letter from Coke. He wanted her title to be Chief Technology Officer. She told him that she could not do that. Until she changed her mind.

In a PowerPoint presentation, she claimed to have been CTO or held other positions that led the technology departments in at least six Fortune 500 companies.

You started to worry. She began complaining that it was taking too long for the grant money to come in. The longer it took for that, the longer it would take for them to get the company off the ground, which put them all at risk of being found out.

Unraveling The Plot

You was not wrong about being found out. Dana Breed, the supervisor who had been brought into deal specifically with her and the second person in the entire company to know about the coating formulas, was starting to realize something was amiss.

Despite being asked several times by Breed to share information from the coating companies with her, You never did. When asked to transfer some of the information to an external hard drive, the chemist failed to do that as well.

Breed found the external hard drive in You’s otherwise empty cubicle.

She began to work with Coke’s legal team and the legal teams from the coating companies to undo the NDAs that were signed.

Around the same time as the team at Coke was finding out what she did, her new bosses were beginning to tire of her antics.

One thing that bothered them was that less than two weeks into her employment, she was taking time off to go to China.

Coworkers also complained that she was bossy. They also reported that she was cold toward them and often left her work for someone else to do.

They also noted that she was obsessed with can liners. This was not inside of her job description. Though, several times, she tried to insert herself into conversations and meeting that revolved around them.

She was furious when told to stick to her lane.

You did nothing to hide her intentions at Eastman. She took pictures of the labs, which was not allowed by company guidelines. Then, she sent an email inquiring about starting a lab in China from her work email account.

Two supervisors and an HR manager decided that the time had come to talk to her.

The meeting went off the rails.

She refused to listen to the supervisors. When given a list of their concerns, she looked at them with disdain and acted as if the problem came from management and not her.

One of the supervisors revealed:

“She refused to read through them, she flung it across the table back to me.”

Trying to cool the growing tension between the supervisors and You, the HR managers directed her to work from home.

You had different plans, though. She stormed across the Eastman campus to the building where the CTO’s office was housed. When she got there, she demanded to speak to him and when informed she couldn’t, she threw a fit.

Security called HR right away and warned of You’s behavior. The decision to fire her happened immediately.

That night, You made the mistake that would lead to her arrest.

Upload Charges

Given that she was about to be fired and her previous behaviors within the company, Eastman IT kept an eye on her account. When she tried to move sensitive documents to the same Google Drive that she kept the coating formulas on, they warned HR.

A specialist was able to reconstruct everything she did.

When she arrived to work the next day, she was greeted by HR. She was informed that her services were no longer required. Then she was asked about the hard drive that had sensitive information on it. You was visibly nervous.

“It’s back at my home,” she told the assembled managers.

The HR manager, two supervisors, and security all agreed to form a caravan to follow her back to her house, they needed to retrieve this hard drive.

One of the IT specialists working on the case happened to be a former FBI agent. He called a friend of his once he noticed that there was trade secrets from Coca-Cola on it and had them open an investigation.

You went back to China. She did so because she hadn’t received any more money and intended to call it off with these business associates. According to the WeChat messages that were retrieved in connection to the case.

A grand jury indicted You on February 12, 2019. The charges included wire fraud and trade secret theft.

Two days later, she was arrested in her Michigan home. FBI agents noted that the apartment was barely furnished. It appeared as though she intended to run.

You maintained her innocence.

A few weeks later, another grand jury issued a superseding indictment. This one added economic espionage charges. This time, several of her former business associates were also charged.

Her defense relied on the notion that any chemist worth their beaker could have come up with the formulas. And because they viewed it as general knowledge, there was no way that it could be considered corporate or economic espionage.

The argument did not work. You was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. She continues to claim she is innocent. Though, her new defense is that she was set up by the United States government.

Did You commit corporate/economic espionage? Or is she right, and she was framed by the US?