Josh Mayers retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in February 2018, and he has 34 years of law enforcement experience. He spent seven years working as a police officer/investigator in New York City and 27 years with the FBI as a Special Agent. In 1985, Josh earned his B.S. in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City; his J.D. in 1991 from Kent College of Law in Chicago, and he completed his Masters Degree from Boston University in December 2019, in Criminal Justice with a concentration in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity. Josh is a graduate of the 263rd Session of the FBI National Academy and a member of Alpha Phi Sigma, the National Criminal Justice Honor Society.
With the FBI, Josh worked most investigative programs, to include violent crime, drugs, gangs, bank robberies, public corruption and fraud cases. He worked counterterrorism matters for over ten years, with numerous deployments to the Middle East and Africa. He was an FBI Firearms Instructor, Hostage Negotiator, spent sixteen years on SWAT, he taught interviewing and interrogation, and undercover operations to local, state and international law enforcement officers. Josh has published four articles including “Catching a Chinese IP Thief: How the FBI Tracked and Caught Sinovel” – The Cipher Brief, April 2018.
Josh was the FBI Case Agent for the seven year long Sinovel Wind Group investigation, which involved the theft of proprietary software by Sinovel, an 18% Chinese State Owned Enterprise, and at one time the third largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world. In 2013, Sinovel was indicted in the Western District of Wisconsin, the corporation along with three individuals were charged with conspiracy and theft of trade secrets for stealing the intellectual Property of AMSC, a U.S. company headquartered in Devens, MA., with offices in Wisconsin, Beijing, and Austria. Sinovel first attempted to hack AMSC’s software in 2010, and in response AMSC installed protective measures to include encryption and a timing limitation to protect its wind turbine control system software. In 2011, Sinovel recruited a disgruntled AMSC engineer and manager in the AMSC Austria office, and offered him a $1.7 million contract. This insider, stole AMSC’s software, removed the protective measures in place and transmitted it to Sinovel R&D managers in Beijing. The economic harm to AMSC that resulted from this theft is estimated at approximately $1.2 billion and approximately 600 jobs. Sentencing in the Sinovel case was July 6, 2018.
Josh has worked as Field Instructor from 2015 to the present, in the Legal Studies/Sociology 694: Field Observation in Criminal Justice & Legal Studies course through the Center for Law, Society, & Justice.