DoJ sentences Chinese nationals in an iPhone repair scam to prison and double damages

A 32-year old Chinese national, Haiteng Wu, has been sentenced to 26 months of prison time by the Department of Justice for running just the next installment of a fraudulent iPhone repair scheme that bilked Apple out of a cool million for the three-year duration of the scam. Not only that, but he and his co-conspirators were sentenced to pay close to $2 million in damages.

After coming from China to study in 2013 and completing his Engineering Master’s Degree in 2015, Haiteng Wu got a real job in the United States and this is when his three-and-a-half-years-long quest to scam Apple’s repair service started before it finished with an arrest in December 2019. 

At one point, however, someone started getting suspicious as this is not the first such case with engineering students from China, and got an alert that something was amiss on a grand scale. It’s not clear if the alert came within Apple’s vast fraud department, or from the port authorities that have been investigating suspicious bulk iPhone shipments from China but in any case, the scheme started falling apart for the Chinese national on an engineering student visa.

Wu’s co-conspirators included his wife, Jiahong Cai, as well as Teang Liu, who helped him with both the fake and authentic iPhone shipments, as well as with the payments scheme. With the nearly $1 million that he now has to return to Apple, Wu bought condos in McLean and Arlington, Virginia, of which the Arlington one was purchased in an all-cash transaction. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan sentenced Wu to the 26 months he had already served in custody since December 2019 when Wu, Cai, and Liu were arrested, so he is to be released immediately. Wu has to pay double the $987,000 amount he owes Apple in restitution and forfeiture money sentencing, including by selling the condos.