Dhirendra Prasad, a former employee at Apple, has confessed in court to defrauding the tech giant of over $17 million.
In a written plea agreement, Prasad described the schemes he carried out while he worked as a buyer for Apple’s Global Service Supply chain, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
He also pleaded guilty in federal court today to conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Prasad admitted the fraud involved “taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts, and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” prosecutors said in a statement.
Prasad admitted these schemes ran from 2011 to 2018 and ultimately resulted in a loss to Apple of more than $17 million.
For one scheme, prosecutors said Prasad arranged to have Apple components shipped to an outside vendor’s warehouse, where they were repackaged and eventually sold back to Apple.
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.
He could face more than 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced next March.
