A federal grand jury indicted a former Government Accountability Office contract worker on charges that he stole dozens of agency laptops and then sold them over the Internet.
Darryl Roger Lyles, 37, a computer technician, was arraigned Thursday in federal court in Washington and pleaded not guilty. His case is set for a status hearing before Judge Reggie B. Walton on Nov. 14.
The indictment charges Lyles with five counts, including wire fraud and theft of government property, and accuses him of earning more than $40,000 from the illegal sales. If convicted of all charges, Lyles faces a likely sentence of up to nearly five years in prison, prosecutors said.
A GAO spokesman said that the thefts were uncovered in an internal inventory and the results were turned over to the U.S. Secret Service.
“We do not believe any classified information was present on the laptops involved and GAO also had procedures in place to cleanse computers of unclassified sensitive data,” said GAO spokesman Chuck Young. “We have not been notified of any sensitive data compromises.”
Lyles, of Capitol Heights, worked at the GAO headquarters in downtown Washington as an information technology specialist, where he was responsible for creating an inventory database for computer parts, monitoring work orders and issuing and retrieving computers for agency employees. Lyles had complete access to GAO’s facilities, prosecutors said.
Between June 2006 and December 2007, while he worked for the agency, Lyles stole at least 30 computers and posted advertisements for these items on the online classified site craigslist.org, according to the indictment.
Ten of these advertisements were posted from a computer inside GAO’s headquarters.
A person from Springfield, Va., identified in the indictment as “D.P.” responded to one advertisements and bought one of the computers for several hundred dollars in cash. D.P. then began to purchase more items from Lyles, including a projector, computer parts, and at least 83 laptop computers from Lyles. D.P. then re-sold all of these items on the online auction site E-Bay.
The indictment doesn’t make clear where Lyles got the 83 laptops.
