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Two Chinese nationals were sentenced to 30 months in federal prison Friday for working as agents of China’s spy agency in the US.

Getting into it: According to the DOJ, Liren “Ryan” Lai, 40, and Yuance Chen, 39, scouted a Navy base, arranged secret cash drops, and tried to recruit American service members while working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Both pleaded guilty to serving as foreign agents without first telling the attorney general. A federal judge in Oakland, California, also ordered them to serve three years of supervised release.

Lai, who came to the US on a tourist visa, recruited Chen, a US permanent resident, and passed messages between him and Chinese intelligence until Chen started taking orders directly. Chen photographed Naval Base Kitsap in Washington state, home to US ballistic missile submarines. He also filmed and photographed recruits and sailors at a Navy recruiting station in Southern California, dug up personal details on a Navy employee and kept files on service members China could try to recruit. The pair also set up “dead drop” cash payments, including about $10,000 left in a backpack in a locker at a recreation center in Livermore, California. In 2025, Lai was sent to Phoenix to arrange another drop of about $20,000.

Court records show Lai brought Chen a phone for secret communications with Chinese intelligence in 2023, and Chen traveled to China in 2024 and 2025 to meet with intelligence officers and pick up new assignments targeting US service members. The FBI arrested both men in June 2025.

In a statement, Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division said, “Let this sentencing serve as a clear warning: If you attempt to jeopardize the safety and security of our service members, our citizens, or our nation, justice will find you.”

The Justice Department didn’t say how many people the pair managed to recruit or how many payments they arranged in total. The case comes as a recent Government Accountability Office report found the FBI isn’t doing enough to counter China’s use of unofficial spies, whom the report says Beijing has relied on for decades to target everything from military secrets to American technology and research.