Two men from Maryland recently got caught scamming Apple out of the $2.5 million in what feds call a ‘sophisticated’ iPhone scheme.
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The scammers, Haotian Sun from Baltimore, MD, and Pengfui Xue from Germantown, MD, ran the scheme for nearly two years before being investigated. According to the New York Post, the scam ran from 2017 to 2019.
The scam involved tricking Apple into thinking out of warranty or faulty phones were real. The company would then send them back new ones covered under the one-year warranty.
2 Men Scammed Apple Out of $2.5 Million in iPhone Scheme
It’s been discovered that the men, both emigrated from China, were having counterfeit iPhones regularly shipped from Hong Kong. The phones even had fraudulent serial numbers, accompanied by fake aliases used by Sun and Xue.
Both men were convicted of shipping 6,000 counterfeit iPhones to Apple and other providers. Postal inspector Stephen Cohen said that the company ‘wrongly’ assumed that the counterfeit phones were under real warranties.
After the men were arrested, officials were able to intercept the packages being shipped to Apple and trace them back to the scammers. The feds wrote down all of the fake serial numbers created by Sun and Xue. According to Cohen they then, “allowed the shipments to be delivered to their intended recipients.”
Both men have been sentenced for the scam, Sun to 57 months in prison and Xue to 54 months. Sun has also been ordered to pay the company $1 million back in restitution, while Xue has been told to pay $397,800.