A Chinese citizen who sent counterfeit products to Apple’s warranty exchange program and tricked the company into giving him an iPhone worth more than $1 million has been sentenced to 26 months in prison. Here is the story of the man who defrauded Apple in an unbelievable way.
Fake iPhone scammer earned more than $1 million
32-year-old Haiteng Wu immigrated to the US in 2013 to study engineering. He earned a master’s degree in 2015 and was legally employed two years later. According to the Justice Department, Wu started a nearly three-year plan to defraud Apple.
Wu’s plan included shipments of fake iPhones from Hong Kong with duplicate IMEI numbers and serial numbers corresponding to original warranty iPhones. Wu and his team in China sent these phones to Apple using fake names, claiming they were iPhones that were no longer working but were under warranty.
After Wu and his friends received real replacement iPhones from Apple, the devices were shipped to other people overseas, including in Hong Kong. Wu recruited others into the plan, including his wife, Jiahong Cai. It also provided forged identity documents, used pseudonyms, opened multiple commercial mail receiving agency mailboxes, and allowed scammers to travel to the United States.
Wu admitted that he defrauded Apple of about $1 million and plans to continue with the plan. He was arrested along with other conspirators in December 2019 and has been in custody ever since. Wu confirmed a conspiracy charge involving mail fraud in May 2020. The US judge announced that he was sentenced to 26 months in prison.
If the details of this case sound familiar, it’s worth reminding that another Chinese engineering student, Quan Jiang, used the same method to defraud Apple in 2017.
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