Chinese Smuggler Gets Eight Years for Shipping U.S. Guns to North Korea
A Chinese national who has been living in the U.S illegally has been jailed for eight years after pleading guilty to exporting weapons to North Korea in containers departing the Port of Long Beach.
Shenghua Wen, 42, a Chinese national who has been in the U.S. since 2012 on an expired student visa, admitted to exporting firearms, ammunition and other military items to North Korea in a scheme that netted him $2 million from Pyongyang to procure the weapons. The guns were hidden in containers departing Long Beach for Hong Kong, then forwarded to North Korea.
Wen was arrested in December last year, and pleaded guilty in June to one count of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and one count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government.
A team of U.S investigators led by the Federal Bureau of Investigations was able to piece together the conspiracy. The scheme started in 2022 when Wen was contacted by two North Korean government officials through an online messaging platform with instructions to smuggle firearms and other goods, including sensitive technology. He is said to have met with officials from North Korea’s government at a North Korean embassy in China where he was directed to procure goods on behalf of Pyongyang. The first shipment happened in 2023 after three containers full of firearms left the Port of Long Beach to China en route to North Korea. To conceal the weapons, Wen is said to have filed false export information regarding the contents of the containers.
Investigators established that in order to run the operations, Wen even purchased a firearms business in Houston that was paid for with money sent by one of his North Korean contacts. Through acquaintances, Wen oversaw the purchasing of many firearms in Texas that were transported to California for shipment to North Korea.
In one of the shipments in December 2023, Wen misrepresented the box's contents as a refrigerator. The weapons shipment was later transported from Hong Kong to Nampo, North Korea.
In September last year, Wen bought approximately 60,000 rounds of 9mm ammunition that he intended to ship to North Korea. Apart from weapons, the Chinese national also obtained sensitive technology including a chemical threat identification device and a handheld broadband receiver that detects known, unknown, illegal, disruptive or interfering transmissions, all of which he intended to send to North Korea.
As part of the scheme, which North Korea financed by wiring $2 million, Wen also tried to buy a civilian airplane engine and a thermal imaging system that could be mounted on an aircraft, which could be used for reconnaissance and target identification.
Having pleaded guilty, Wen will serve eight years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California.