A former employee at Apple Inc. has been sentenced to three years in prison for stealing approximately $17 million from the company through wire fraud.
The Cupertino—based company examined the losses that the former employee had committed leading to the firing from Apple and the arrest from federal authorities.
According to a release from the Department of Justice (DOJ), Dhirendra Prasad was also ordered to pay $19,270,683 in restitution for conspiring to defraud Apple of millions of dollars and for related tax crimes.
Prasad 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 U.S. and one count of tax evasion, the DOJ said.
Prasad pleaded guilty to the first and fourth counts on November 2, 2022. The remaining counts were dismissed at sentencing.
During his employment at Apple between December 2008 and December 2018, Prasad was a “buyer” in Apple’s Global Service Supply Chain and was responsible for facilitating the process through which the company bought parts to perform warranty repairs on older devices.
The former Apple employee said to have dealt with matters focused on buying and selling parts & services from multiple vendors.
Prasad allegedly exploited his position and conspired with two vendors to defraud Apple by taking kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices, and causing Apple to pay for items and services it never received. The scheme resulted in a loss of more than $17 million, according to the DOJ.
The Justice Department added that Prasad also acknowledged that he had avoided paying taxes on the proceeds from his schemes.
“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,” the department said in its press release.
The convicted former employee had abused his power that involved enriching himself that involved accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation at Apple’s expense.
In addition to meting out the three-year prison sentence, a judge ordered Prasad to forfeit over $5,491,713 worth of assets, which the government seized. He owed over $1.8 million to the IRS and paid an additional $8.1 million in cash.
Prasad is expected to be supervised for 3 years after his prison sentence, but it is unclear how long he will be behind bars. He used insider information to bypass the company’s fraud-detection techniques to design his suspicious schemes to avoid detection that were found to be incriminating.
Apple products that Prasad had mishandled included Macs, hardware, and iPhones that contributed to Apple’s revenue.
Produced in association with Benzinga
