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- A former Apple employee has been sentenced to three years in prison and over $30 million for a fraud scheme.
- Dhirendra Prasad pleaded guilty to the scheme last year and was sentenced earlier this week.
- Prasad and two others partook in schemes like double billing Apple for parts, defrauding the company of over $17 million.
A former Apple employee was sentenced to three years in prison and hit with over $30 million in financial penalties for a yearslong scheme that involved himself and two others defrauding the company of over $17 million.
Dhirenda Prasad, 55, was charged with several crimes related to the fraud last March, and pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and defraud the US in November. He was sentenced earlier this week to prison time and ordered to pay Apple and the Internal Revenue Service a combined $19 million in restitution, authorities announced Wednesday.
From 2011 through 2018, Prasad — alongside Robert Hansen and Don Baker, who ran companies that sold products to Apple — "exploited his position" as a buyer in the company's supply chain to defraud the company, authorities said.
Hansen, Baker, and Prasad all admitted to their roles in the schemes, authorities said.
Prasad was part of the supply chain team that purchased parts for Apple to use to perform warranty repairs. According to authorities, he conspired with the business owners to steal parts, alter invoices, double bill Apple for components it already received, and charge the company for parts it never actually bought.
In one 2013 example cited by prosecutors when he pleaded guilty, Prasad sent motherboards already owned by Apple to Baker, whose company took them apart and sold them back as individual parts, effectively billing Apple for its own property.
In 2016, Prasad sent more of Apple's parts to Hansen, who simply repackaged them and sent them back as if they were a new order, again forcing Apple to pay for its own property.
Prasad also admitted he evaded paying taxes on his portion of the $17 million the group made from the fraud schemes. Charges of tax evasion and money laundering were dropped at his sentencing after he pleaded guilty in November.
The court ordered Prasad to forfeit about $5.5 million in assets the government seized when he was arrested. He is also required to pay another $8 million in forfeitures, along with $17.4 million in restitution to Apple and $1.8 million to the IRS, totaling just under $33 million in penalties.
His prison term will also be followed by three years of supervised release.