Apple couldn’t tell fake iPhones from real ones, lost $2.5M to scammers
Two men involved in an elaborate scheme duping Apple into replacing about 6,000 counterfeit iPhones with genuine iPhones were sentenced to prison this week, the US Department of Justice announced Thursday.
Together with their co-conspirators, the 34-year-old scammers, Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue, squeezed Apple for about $2.5 million, as employees for years failed to detect what the DOJ described as a rather “sophisticated” scheme between 2017 and 2019.
Now Sun has been sentenced to 57 months in prison and must pay more than $1 million to Apple in restitution. For his part, Xue was sentenced to 54 months and ordered to pay $397,800 in restitution, the DOJ said. Additionally, both men must also serve three years of supervised release and forfeit thousands more following the judgment.
