Two people from Maryland have been discovered responsible of making an attempt to defraud Apple by submitting counterfeit iTelephones for restore. The scheme, if profitable, may have price Apple over $3 million.
What Occurred: Haotian Solar and Pengfei Xue, residents of Germantown, Maryland, had been convicted on Tuesday by a federal jury for his or her involvement in a fraudulent scheme focusing on Apple.
The 33-year-old duo and different co-conspirators tried to acquire real iPhones from Apple by submitting pretend units via the corporate’s restore program.
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” In response to the federal government’s proof, between Might 2017 and September 2019, Solar, Xue, and different conspirators defrauded Apple Inc. by submitting counterfeit iPhones to Apple for restore to get Apple to trade them with real alternative iPhones,” the press launch by the DC U.S. Lawyer’s workplace acknowledged.
The counterfeit iPhones shipped from Hong Kong had been despatched to UPS mailboxes within the Washington D.C. Metropolitan space. These units, outfitted with spoofed serial and IMEI numbers, had been submitted to Apple retail and Apple Approved Service Suppliers.
They managed to submit over 5,000 pretend telephones, which may have resulted in a lack of greater than $3 million for Apple.
The pair was arrested in December 2019 and now face a most sentence of 20 years in jail for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and mail fraud. The U.S. District Courtroom Decide Timothy J. Kelly scheduled sentencing for June 21 later this yr.
Why It Issues: This isn’t the primary time that people have tried to defraud Apple utilizing counterfeit iPhones. In an analogous case in 2022, a scammer duped Apple $1 million in iPhones and was sentenced to jail. The scammer, Haiteng Wu, used an analogous technique of returning pretend iPhones to Apple to obtain genuine replacements, exploiting the corporate’s return coverage.
Final yr in November, it was reported {that a} U.Ok. resident was duped after they purchased an iPhone 15 Professional Max immediately from Apple’s official web site however acquired a clone that solely appeared eerily like the unique.
These incidents spotlight the vulnerability of Apple’s restore and alternative packages to fraudulent actions, posing a major monetary threat to the tech large. It additionally underscores the necessity for strong measures to detect and stop such scams, as they’ll doubtlessly lead to substantial losses for the corporate.
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