2 males associated with a sophisticated plan deceiving Apple into changing about 6,000 fake iPhones with authentic iPhones were sentenced to jail today, the United States Department of Justice revealed Thursday.

Together with their co-conspirators, the 34-year-old fraudsters, Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue, squeezed Apple for about $2.5 million, as staff members for many years stopped working to identify what the DOJ referred to as a rather “sophisticated” plan in between 2017 and 2019.

Now Sun has actually been sentenced to 57 months in jail and should pay more than $1 million to Apple in restitution. For his part, Xue was sentenced to 54 months and purchased to pay $397,800 in restitution, the DOJ stated. Furthermore, both guys should likewise serve 3 years of monitored release and surrender thousands more following the judgment.

The plan depended upon deceiving Apple into accepting phony phones throughout returns by spoofing identification numbers or International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers connected to genuine clients’ iPhones that were still under service warranty. (Apple supplies a 1 year service warranty for brand-new iPhones found to have problems and offers insurance coverage strategies to extend the service warranties.)

The fraudsters were captured and founded guilty of mail scams and conspiracy to dedicate mail scams after an Apple detective tipped police off, a 2019 affidavit from postal inspector Stephen Cohen stated.

Police obstructed bundles and verified that countless fake phones were being delivered from China, then sent to Apple for repair work either by mail or personally. These counterfeit phones, Cohen stated, were either out of service warranty or consisted of fake parts, however Apple “wrongly” thought that they were genuine phones under genuine guarantees, typically changing lots of phony phones fraudulently returned in a single delivery, Cohen stated.