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A former Apple employee has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay back over $19 million after taking kickbacks, stealing parts, inflating invoices, and causing Apple to pay for items and services it never received, federal prosecutors said.
Dhirendra Prasad, 55, a “buyer” in Apple’s Global Service Supply Chain division, pleaded guilty this week in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud. He also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, in relation to tax offenses.
It was Prasad’s job as an Apple buyer to facilitate the process through which Apple bought parts to perform warranty repairs on older devices.
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“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,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in a sentencing memorandum. “All while accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of compensation from Apple in the form of salary and bonuses.”
Prasad also used his “insider information” regarding the company’s fraud-detection techniques to design his criminal schemes, prosecutors said. Prasad, of Mountain House, Calif., pleaded guilty in November.
Two co-conspirators were also identified by Prasad in his plea agreement: Robert Gary Hansen and Don M. Baker. Hansen and Baker, who each owned outside vendor companies that did business with Apple, were charged earlier in separate federal cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
In court papers, prosecutors pointed to several examples of Prasad’s fraudulent activity. In 2016, Prasad arranged to have Apple components shipped to a warehouse of Hansen’s business, where they were repackaged and sold back to Apple – “thus billing Apple for its own components,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
In addition to the three-year prison sentence, a federal judge ordered Prasad to forfeit over $5,491,713 worth of assets that already have been seized by the government. He was also ordered to pay restitution of $17,398,104 to Apple and $1,872,579 to the IRS.
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