Up to 20 years in prison: one of the (best) reasons you don’t want to defraud Apple Inc.،
Two people were convicted in connection with a $3 million iPhone repair scheme involving more than 5,000 iPhones, 9to5Mac reports.
Haotian Sun (33) and Pengfei Xue (same age) were found guilty of this scheme by a federal jury, a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office bed.
Sun and Xue were found guilty of “participating in a sophisticated scheme to defraud Apple out of millions of dollars worth of iPhones” and, as in other cases, the scam involved submitting counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repair, which were later replaced by Apple with real iPhones.
According to government-provided evidence, between May 2017 and September 2019, Sun, Xue and other conspirators defrauded Apple Inc. by submitting counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repair in order to trick Apple into exchanging them for genuine iPhones. replacement. Sun and Xue received shipments of non-genuine iPhones from Hong Kong in UPS mailboxes in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. They then submitted the fake iPhones, with falsified serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers, including the Georgetown Apple Store. Trial evidence showed that the conspirators submitted more than 5,000 inauthentic phones to Apple during the conspiracy, intending to cause Apple a loss of more than $3 million. Sun and Xue used various aliases during the scheme. They were arrested on December 5, 2019.
They risk up to 20 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for June 21, 2024.
This is strikingly similar to the nefarious activities of the Liao brothers: they were sentenced to 41 months in prison for defrauding $6.1 million using iPhones and iPads. Their plan was the same: import fake iPhones and iPads from China, exchange them for real Apple phones and tablets and sell them abroad for a profit.
