Inside CRACK99: Xiang Li, Software Piracy, and the Price of Knowledge

In the late 2000s, while most internet users were quietly downloading torrents and cracking Photoshop out of frustration or necessity, a man in Chengdu, China, was doing it bigger, smarter, and far more dangerously—at least in the eyes of the U.S. government.

His name was Xiang Li. Through his website, CRACK99, he distributed cracked versions of some of the most expensive and highly restricted software on Earth.

These were tools used in military engineering, satellite communications, weapons design, and critical aerospace systems. In a world where powerful knowledge was locked behind licensing agreements and pricing designed for billion-dollar governments, Li offered access for a price nearly anyone could afford.

From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.

He did not code these tools himself or crack the protections. They were pirated elsewhere. He simply redistributed them, turning scarcity into availability.

His customers weren’t criminal masterminds. They were engineers, small business owners, students, and even U.S. government employees. Among them was a NASA engineer and a contractor who worked on radar software for Marine One, the helicopter used by the President of the United States.

That revelation rattled national security agencies. It meant classified systems were being developed, at least in part, using pirated tools. It also meant the official channels were either too expensive or too inaccessible, even to insiders.

When access to knowledge is locked behind six-figure software licenses, people will find another way in.

In 2010, Homeland Security and the Defense Criminal Investigation Service launched an undercover investigation led by David Locke Hall, a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and federal prosecutor. For eighteen months, agents posed as buyers, gained Li’s trust, and arranged a face-to-face meeting in Saipan, a U.S. territory in the Pacific.

Li flew to the island expecting a lucrative expansion of his business. He arrived with his mother-in-law and son, unaware he had entered U.S. jurisdiction. At a beachfront hotel, Li handed over cracked software and 20GB of stolen data. When he confirmed he was the man behind CRACK99, federal agents arrested him.

That moment, Hall later said, was the most dangerous part of the entire operation. You never know how someone will react when the illusion collapses. Li, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, did not look like a criminal. But appearances can be deceiving.

After his arrest, Hall tried to soften the impact on Li’s family. He took the boy out for ice cream while agents searched the hotel room. He didn’t feel sorry for Li in that moment, but he did feel for the child, caught in something he couldn’t understand.

Li was extradited to the mainland and charged in Delaware. In 2013, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and copyright infringement. He was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison; one of the longest sentences for software piracy in American history.

While law enforcement saw the case as a vital win against cybercrime, others see a deeper question: If software is priced out of reach, and if even government scientists are turning to piracy, is the problem really the pirate—or the system?

Li didn’t set out to sabotage anything. He simply didn’t believe that tools to build machines or simulate flight should be locked away behind institutional gates. He didn’t care who his customers were, and that scared people. But it also said something damning about how modern knowledge is managed: access to it is a privilege, not a right.

Xiang Li sits in prison, not as a hacker or spy, but as someone who cracked open the paywall and asked why it was there to begin with.