Did you catch this?

A part-time cameraman who worked for NBC found out the hard way that “Akbar,” the international broker he had met on eBay, wasn’t really looking to ship stolen night-vision lenses to Iran.

Instead, the broker was a federal customs agent, and the cameraman, Erik Kyriacou, 24, of North Babylon, found himself in a Philadelphia courtroom Monday pleading guilty to four federal counts, including trying to export technology to an “axis of evil” country…

…Kyriacou was arrested last April after offering four Astroscope night-vision lenses for sale in a public auction on eBay, then privately negotiating an $8,000 sale price with the undercover agent, court records show. He shipped them to an address in Vienna, Austria, in January 2004, according to the court papers.

He had stolen them from NBC, where he worked as a news camerman, Welsh said.

The federal customs agent posing as broker told Kyriacou before he sold the lenses that they would be headed to Iran, and that there was no license to ship them there, the court documents say.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday that there had been “a large number of cases over the years” of representatives from Iran being caught trying to buy forbidden technologies, especially spare airplane parts.

A USAO statement and link to Kyriacou’s criminal indicment are here.

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