Two Chinese men, Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue, have been convicted by a US federal jury in the District of Columbia for participating in a sophisticated scheme in which they submitted more than 5,000 inauthentic phones to Apple Inc., intending to cause a loss of more than $3 million to the company.
The US Justice Department disclosed this in a statement on Tuesday, February 20.
“According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, from May 2017 to September 2019, Haotian Sun, also known as Hao Sun, Jack Sun, and Frank Sun, 33, of Baltimore, Maryland, and Pengfei Xue, 33, of Germantown, Maryland, along with their co-conspirators, submitted counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repair to get Apple to exchange them with genuine replacement iPhones.
“Sun and Xue received shipments of inauthentic iPhones from Hong Kong at UPS mailboxes throughout the D.C. Metropolitan area.
“They then submitted the fake iPhones, with spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers.
“In 2017, Sun opened eight UPS Store mailboxes using his Maryland driver’s license and university identification card. U.S. postal inspectors arrested Sun and Xue in December 2019.
“The jury convicted Sun and Xue of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
“They are scheduled to be sentenced on June 21 and each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
“A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors,” the statement read.
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