Scammers in the slammer for years after ripping off Apple with fake iPhone returns

Duo must also cough up $1.5M for pulling off multi-million-dollar exchange swindle

Two fraudsters will spend nearly five years behind bars each and pay a combined $1.5 million for bilking Apple out of millions of dollars worth of iPhones. 

Haotian Sun, 34, a Chinese citizen living in Baltimore, Maryland, was sentenced to 57 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $1,072,200 in restitution to Apple plus a forfeiture money judgment of $53,610. 

The other scammer, Pengfei Xue, 34, a Chinese citizen living in Germantown, Maryland, got 54 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and has been ordered to pay $397,800 to Apple along with a $19,890 money judgment.

According to the court documents, between June 2017 and December 2019, the two men engaged in a scheme to return fake iPhones to Apple for repair and trick the iBiz into replacing them with real ones.

The duo received shipments of inauthentic iPhones from Hong Kong at mailboxes throughout the Washington DC area. They then "returned" the fake phones, with spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple retail stores, authorized service providers, or via the mail.

"They returned phones under the false pretense that the suspected counterfeit phones were under warranty and should be replaced due to malfunction or other reason," according to the court documents [PDF]. "Apple, wrongly believing that the person submitting the replacement request was entitled to a replacement, responded by providing a new iPhone either in person at an Apple retail store or by shipping a new iPhone to addresses provided by the conspirators."

In total, the two men along with two other co-conspirators, submitted more than 6,000 phony phones to Apple, costing the iThings giant more than $2.5 million in losses.

Apple did not immediately respond to The Register's request for comment.

Sun and Xue were both convicted in February after a five-day jury trial of one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Sun was also convicted of one count of mail fraud and Xue was convicted of six counts of mail fraud.

And while their stretch in the big house will give the two plenty of time to rethink their life choices, they got off relatively easy for their multi-million-dollar scheme. The maximum term for the duo's crimes is 20 years each. ®