✔️ 2022-03-11 01:26:34 – Paris/France.
A Chinese national living in Virginia was sentenced to one year in federal prison for conspiring to defraud Apple out of $1 million.
A man living in Virginia has been convicted for his part in a scheme to defraud Apple out of $1 million. Above, an Apple iPhone 13 Pro with a silicone case sits on top of a box with the Apple logo visible, in Lafayette, Calif., on Dec. 28, 2021. Gado/Getty Images
Teang Liu, 38, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in February 2021, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ ). The scheme, the department said, involved Apple's iPhone.
When announcing Liu's sentencing, the department detailed the illegal procedure. Liu, Haiteng Wu – who recruited Liu – and Wu's wife, Jiahong Cai, were receiving shipments of fake iPhones from Hong Kong, which contained the international mobile equipment identity and serial numbers matching the real iPhones.
One of the three involved in the illegal business would then bring the fake phones to an Apple store and pretend their fraudulent devices were in fact real in order to get a replacement, a genuine iPhone from the tech giant. Once the real Apple phones were in their possession, they would then be shipped overseas to places like Hong Kong, the department said.
The DOJ said this deceptive project lasted two years, from June 2016 to approximately June 2018. During this time, the three people managed to scam Apple out of almost a million dollars.
The department said it fully intends to go ahead with its plan, scamming even more money from Apple. He also said that Liu's particular part of the business involved commercial courier agency mailboxes. He opened a number of these mailboxes, the vast majority of them at UPS stores, and used fake IDs to do so.
He also took the fakes to Apple and got the real phones, mostly in Florida and the Rocky Mountains area.
In addition to his prison sentence, Liu was ordered to pay back nearly $580 in restitution. He will be on probation for a year after his prison sentence, the department said.
All three were taken into custody in late 2019. In May 2020, Liu, Wu and Cai pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
Wu, the department said, received his sentence in February 2021. He received a sentence served, which amounted to about 26 months. Cai was actually kicked out of the country after spending about five months in a DC prison.
Liu came to the United States in 2011 and earned a master's degree from George Washington University in 2014.
Newsweek contacted the DOJ for comment, but did not hear back before publication.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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