The Verge Investigation Exposes How DJI Is Evading the FCC's Foreign Drone Ban Through Shell Companies

DJI Shell Companies Expose the FCC Drone Ban as Theater

Konrad Iturbe's approach was straightforward: search the FCC's own databases for the radio frequencies used by DJI's proprietary wireless transmission system, and see whose names come up besides the world's biggest drone company.

What he found was a network of companies quietly passing Chinese drones through a ban designed to keep them out of the United States. A software developer and journalist, Iturbe had been watching for months as barely disguised DJI products appeared under new brand names. He called them "DJI front companies." 1

The most brazen discovery came this June. The DJI radio fingerprint led Iturbe to FCC filings for Odyssey Robot, a company doing business as Galiview Tech. In March, Odyssey Robot became the first drone brand equipped with DJI technology to win FCC approval since the December 2025 ban on foreign drones took effect. 1

The approval rested on a declaration filed February 6th by an individual named Randolph Howard Eason, who stated on an FCC form that Odyssey Robot's drone and controller were designed, developed, and manufactured in the United States. The FCC approved the application without questioning the claim. 1

What did American manufacturing look like in practice? Odyssey Robot listed its headquarters at 21 Miller Alley, Suite 210, in Pasadena, California. That address is a coworking space called Industrious, whose rules explicitly prohibit manufacturing on the premises. The company named its assembly partner as eTak Worldwide Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas. eTak is an e-waste recycling facility that collects and dismantles discarded electronics. 1

If Galiview was trying to hide the DJI connection, the effort was minimal. The company's own website listed DJI's trademarked OcuSync technology among its product features. 1

The FCC had multiple opportunities to catch this. The agency could have flagged the OcuSync frequencies in its own filing database, noticed that the drone was tested by a Chinese lab, or simply checked whether the Pasadena address housed a factory. None of that happened. 1

The ban took effect December 22nd, 2025, when the FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr barred future foreign consumer drones from the US market without a special waiver. The stated rationale was national security. Yet the waiver application contains no questions about the security of the technology itself. It asks foreign companies to submit US manufacturing plans while imposing no comparable requirement on domestic companies. Consumer drones are, for all practical purposes, entirely manufactured in China. 1

Iturbe had been mapping this pattern for months before the Odyssey Robot discovery. He previously identified Skyrover, a brand selling a budget drone that closely resembled the DJI Mini 4 Pro, and Xtra, a company that allowed DJI cameras to enter the US under a different name. DJI declined to confirm or deny its connection to any of these companies when contacted by The Verge. 1

The FCC built its enforcement regime on self-certification. Companies fill out forms declaring their products are American-made, and the agency takes them at their word. No physical inspection. No site visit. No verification that the address on the filing is anything other than a desk in a coworking space where the lease forbids manufacturing.

That enforcement model does not stay contained to drones. Any regulatory regime that trusts companies to police themselves inherits the same structural weakness. The FCC's own database contained the radio signatures that would have exposed Odyssey Robot, and nobody at the agency looked. For procurement teams, an FCC approval tells them nothing about where a product was actually built. For investors counting on tech-decoupling policy to force domestic manufacturing, the cost of routing around it is a coworking desk and a shell company. Odyssey Robot did not defeat the ban through sophisticated legal maneuvering. It defeated the ban by filing a declaration that a single person with database access could unravel in an afternoon.