Former Apple employee Dhirendra Prasad has been jailed for three years for defrauding Apple of around $17 million between December 2008 to December 2018. He has been ordered to repay the stolen funds.
Prasad was a buyer in Apple’s Global Service Supply Chain facilitating the process through which Apple bought parts to perform warranty repairs on older devices.
Prasad conspired with two separate Apple vendors to defraud Apple by taking kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices, and causing Apple to pay $17 million for items and services it never received.
In addition to engaging in two separate criminal conspiracies with Apple vendors, Prasad also admitted to evading tax on the proceeds of his criminal schemes.
Prasad admitted his co-conspirators in the fraud schemes were Robert Gary Hansen and Don M. Baker, who reside in the Central District of California. Hansen and Baker each owned vendor companies and their companies engaged in business with Apple.
Hansen and Baker were earlier charged in separate federal criminal cases, and they have admitted their involvement in the schemes.
In one of several fraud schemes admitted by Prasad, in 2013 he had motherboards shipped from Apple’s inventory to Baker’s company, CTrends. Baker arranged to have the motherboards’ components harvested, and Prasad arranged for Apple to issue purchase orders for those harvested components.
Baker shipped the harvested components back to Apple, and CTrends submitted invoices to Apple, thus billing Apple for its own components. Prasad caused Apple to pay the fraudulent invoices, and Baker and Prasad thereafter split the proceeds of the fraud.
In another example, Prasad arranged to have components shipped from Apple’s inventory located in a Nevada warehouse to Hansen’s business, Quality Electronics Distributors, Inc.
Hansen intercepted the components, removed them from their packaging, placed them in new packaging, and shipped them back to Apple’s warehouse. Prasad created purchase orders for the components, and Hansen submitted invoices to Apple for them, thus billing Apple for its own components. Prasad caused Apple to pay the fraudulent invoices, and Hansen and Prasad split the proceeds of the fraud.
Prasad was ordered to pay $19.2 million in restitution for conspiring to defraud Apple, Inc., of millions of dollars and for related tax crimes,
Prasad, 55, from Mountain House in San Joaquin County, was previously charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering, one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, and one count of tax evasion.
He pleaded guilty to the first and fourth counts on November 2, 2022. The remaining counts were dismissed at sentencing.
A statement from the California Attorney’s Office said:
“By virtue of his position at Apple Prasad was given substantial discretion to make autonomous decisions to benefit his employer.
“Prasad betrayed this trust, and abused his power to enrich himself at his employer’s expense – all while accepting hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of compensation from Apple in the form of salary and bonuses. Additionally, Prasad used his insider information regarding the company’s fraud-detection techniques to design his criminal schemes to avoid detection”.
In addition to the three-year prison sentence, he was ordered to forfeit over $5,491,713 worth of assets seized by the government and to pay an additional forfeit of $8,133,005. He must also pay $17,398,104 to Apple and $1,872,579 to the IRS. He will serve three years of supervised release after the prison term.
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