Feds bust $900,000 iPhone repair & return scam in Oregon

“Two engineering students in Oregon are accused of bringing thousands of counterfeit iPhones to Apple and having them replaced with real ones that they then shipped to China for sale,” William Gallagher reports for AppleInsider.
“Students Yangyang Zhou and Quan Jiang, both Chinese nationals studying in Oregon, are accused of getting Apple to replace their counterfeit iPhones with real ones. Each iPhone was replaced under Apple’s repair policies and the thousands of phones were then sent to China where they were sold,” Gallagher reports. “Apple reportedly estimates the cost of the fraud to be $895,800.”
“According to court records as reported by The Oregonian newspaper, Apple received more than 3,000 warranty claims from Jiang and in 1,493 cases replaced his phone,” Gallagher reports. “At the time of the alleged fraud, Zhou and Jiang were both living in Corvallis, Oregon, and were on student visas to study engineering. Jiang was studying at Linn Benton Community College and Zhou at Oregon Sciences University.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 1,493 replacement iPhones to one person? You’d think the thousandth replacement iPhone going to the same guy would have raised the red flag at Apple, wouldn’t you?
Apple Retail Stores’ ability to identify real iPhones from counterfeits on site needs some tweaking.