Former Apple Employee Admits to Defrauding Cupertino And IRS Out of $18.8M
A former Apple employee admitted to having defrauded his employer of $17 million in seven years between 2011 through 2018.
A former Apple employee admitted to having defrauded his employer of $17 million in seven years between 2011 through 2018. Dhirendra Prasad pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal conduct, including mail fraud and wire fraud, and conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern California, Prasad, 52, commenced his employment at Apple in 2008. Since 2011, he has engaged in fraudulent activities until 2018, culminating in a total loss of $17 million to Apple.
Prasad also pleaded guilty to having engaged in tax fraud totaling $1.8 million in losses to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
While at Apple, Prasad’s role in the company’s Global Service Supply Chain division included purchasing parts and services from vendors. “Prasad admitted he began to defraud Apple as early as 2011 by taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts, and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern California.
Prasad, a Mountain House, CA resident, conspired with Robert Gary Hansen and Don Baker of the state’s Central District, both of whom also admitted to their crimes. Hansen and Baker owned and operated fraudulent vendor companies, namely Quality Electronics Distributors, Inc, and CTrends, respectively.
“In one of several fraud schemes admitted by Prasad, in 2013, he had motherboards shipped from Apple’s inventory to Baker’s company, CTrends. Baker arranged to have the motherboards’ components harvested, and Prasad arranged for Apple to issue purchase orders for those harvested components,” the Department of Justice release explains.
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“Baker shipped the harvested components back to Apple, and CTrends submitted invoices to Apple, thus billing Apple for its own components. Prasad caused Apple to pay the fraudulent invoices, and Baker and Prasad thereafter split the proceeds of the fraud.”
Prasad and Hansen also carried out similar operations wherein Prasad shipped Apple inventory components in Nevada to Quality Electronics Distributors, where Hansen would repackage and ship it back to Apple in exchange for invoices which would then be split between the duo.
Prasad would then direct the proceeds from these fraudulent transactions to his creditors and through a shell company “to issue sham invoices to CTrends in order to conceal Baker’s illicit payments to Prasad and to allow Baker to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of unjustified tax deductions” totaling $1.8 million.
“The United States also instituted a civil forfeiture action to forfeit the assets acquired by Prasad with the fraud proceeds, including multiple real properties he purchased and numerous financial accounts containing funds traced to Prasad’s crimes. These assets have an aggregate value of approximately $5 million. Today, Prasad agreed to forfeit all the assets to the United States,” the press release reads.
Prasad faces a maximum sentence of 20 years for one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud and a maximum sentence of five years for his second offense of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Prasad’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for next year on March 14, 2023.
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