Hong Kong (CNN)A Singaporean man living in Washington D.C. has pleaded guilty to being an "illegal agent of a foreign power," prosecutors said Friday.
Jun Wei Yeo, also known as Dickson Yeo, worked for Chinese intelligence for four or five years, recruiting Americans with access to sensitive information over the internet and commissioning them to write reports, which he then passed on to Beijing. "The Chinese Government uses an array of duplicity to obtain sensitive information from unsuspecting Americans," United States Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in a statement. "Yeo was central to one such scheme, using career networking sites and a false consulting firm to lure Americans who might be of interest to the Chinese government. This is yet another example of the Chinese government's exploitation of the openness of American society." His guilty plea comes amid an ongoing crackdown on Chinese operatives in the US. On Friday, a Chinese military-linked scientist who had been hiding out in the country's San Francisco consulate surrendered to US authorities. Her arrest followed the shuttering of the Chinese consulate in Houston, which Washington has linked to espionage operations and Intellectual Property theft. That move sparked a major backlash from Beijing, which has ordered the closure of the US consulate in Chengdu, which it also accuses of being a hub of spying operations.