Business Espionage: GlobeRanger - Seduced and Mocked

TX - A lawsuit filed in state court Friday reads like a Hollywood script: It includes sex, deception and espionage in an alleged conspiracy to rob a Richardson company of its livelihood.

GlobeRanger Corp. makes radio-frequency tags that help track inventory, a technology often called RFID, short for radio frequency identification. It says it poured millions of dollars and 10 years into an effort to sell its technology to the U.S. Navy.

Then came a woman named Kim Gray, who works for an Alaska-based software company called Naniq Systems LLC. According to GlobeRanger, Gray had an affair with Robert Bacon, the program director for the Navy's RFID efforts. The suit also alleges that Gray was also in a relationship with German company Software AG.

That's the company that, despite not having any experience with RFID in the application GlobeRanger had been developing, swooped in and won a contract with the Navy to do what GlobeRanger had been trying to do for a decade...

The defendants' attitude towards stealing a decade of GlobeRanger's work was not just malicious, it was cavalier: their co-conspirator, on tape, not only admits that they misappropriated the technology, he laughs about it," reads the suit filed in state court in Dallas. (more) (GlobeRanger lawsuit)