A Chinese man was sentenced to 26 months in jail for his role in a plot to cheat iPhone Apple out of more than $1 million by deceiving the corporation into replacing hundreds of counterfeit iPhones with genuine phones through its warranty programme.
Haiteng Wu, 32, a 32-year-old engineering post-graduate living in McLean, Virginia, travelled to the United States in 2013 and found legal work before engaging on the nearly three-and-a-half-year-long plan to defraud Apple. Also see Top 10 best TikTok lights in 2022
Wu and other conspirators received several parcels containing hundreds of inoperable, counterfeit iPhones from Hong Kong collaborators as part of the plot. The phones had forged IMEI and serial numbers that linked to genuine in-warranty iPhones.
Using fictitious identities, the conspirators then returned the phoney phones to Apple, stating the “iPhones” were no longer functional and should be replaced under warranty. Apple restored the counterfeit handsets with genuine iPhones, and Wu then returned the fraudulently obtained gadgets to conspirators in other countries, including Hong Kong.
Wu persuaded others to join the scheme, including his wife, Jiahong Cai, and Teang Liu, and obtained fraudulent identification cards, utilised aliases, and created many commercial mail receiving agency mailboxes.
Wu admitted to robbing Apple of over $1 million and planned to defraud the business of much more money. Wu and his co-conspirators were apprehended in December 2019, and he has been detained since since.
Wu pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to conduct mail fraud in May 2020. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan sentenced Wu to the time he had previously served in jail and ordered him to pay $987,000 in restitution and an equal amount in a forfeiture money judgement on Tuesday.
Cai, like her husband, pled guilty to mail fraud, and the judge sentenced her to more than five months in prison after her guilty plea. Liu, who pled guilty to the same charge, will be sentenced next month. The US Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, and the US Postal Inspection Service investigated the matter.
This isn’t the first time Apple has been fooled into replacing hundreds of counterfeit iPhones with genuine phones via its warranty programme. In 2019, a US district judge convicted Chinese engineering student Quan Jiang to three years and one month in jail after he was found guilty of defrauding Apple in the same manner, again for $1 million.