The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has found two men guilty of a “sophisticated scheme to defraud Apple out of million dollars’ worth of iPhones”.
Haotian Sun, 33, and Pengfei Xue, 33, both Chinese nationals, could face 20 years in jail, with sentencing scheduled for 21 June.
Sun, of Baltimore, Xue, of Germantown, Maryland, and other conspirators sent more than 5,000 counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repair and exchanged them for genuine iPhones as replacements, which is expected to have caused a loss of more than US$3 million to Apple.
This is not the first time scammers have resorted to this kind of fraud to trick Apple.
In 2017, for example, two Chinese engineering students started smuggling fake copies of iPhones from China to the US.
In many cases Apple replaced the counterfeit iPhones with originals, which were then shipped to China, according to a report from The Verge, which confirmed that the cost to Apple amounted to an estimated US$ 895,800.
