Apple: Former employee embezzled tens of millions of dollars  

Apple fell victim to fraud that had been going on for years

A former Apple employee has admitted to stealing more than $17 million from the giant company for years . This is Dhirenda Prasad, who pleaded guilty in court to defrauding his employer. 

For the past decade, he worked at Apple as a buyer in the GLobal Service Supply Chain division and confessed to ” taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts and forcing Apple to pay for items and services it never received, ” according to the prosecutor’s office. of the US for the Northern District of California. Prasad started his illegal activity in 2011 and continued till 2018. 

Indeed, in one of his frauds, Prasad stated that he shipped motherboards from Apple’s inventory to CTrends, a company run by his partner, Don M. Baker, who had earlier admitted his complicity. Baker assembled parts from the motherboards, and then Prasad arranged the orders for those parts. After Baker shipped the parts back to Apple, CTrends submitted invoices for which Prasad arranged payment. In the end, the two made Apple pay for its own parts and split the proceeds of the scam.

In addition to defrauding Apple, Prasad confessed to engaging in tax fraud. He directed payments from Robert Gary Hansen (another accomplice who admitted to participating in the frauds) directly to his creditors. In addition, Prasad arranged for a shell company to send bogus invoices to CTrends in order to cover the illegal payments Baker made to him. That allowed Baker ” to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars in unwarranted tax deductions ,” the U.S. attorney’s office said. In total, prosecutors allege the scams cost the IRS more than $1.8 million.

Prasad will be sentenced in March. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Prasad also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. In addition, Prasad agreed to forfeit approximately $5 million worth of assets acquired as a result of his criminal activities, including real estate.