Almost all Apple Products come with one year warranty against manufacturing defects and hardware failures. If you send in your defected device that’s under warranty, then Apple will repair it, or in same cases, even replace it with a new one.
However, two Chinese students attending college in Oregon have scammed Apple by taking advantage of the company’s repair policy.
So, the con was very simple. Yangyang Zhou and Quan Jiang, two engineering students allegedly brought in thousand of fake iPhones, sent them to Apple filing warranty complaints and got band new ‘genuine’ iPhones in return. The new iPhones were then sent back to their friends and relatives in China to flip for profit.
YES, Apple, out of all the companies, fell for this con. But, you can’t blame the company for being nice with replacement phones, plus these counterfeit iPhones resemble the real thing, right? The duo submitted a total of 3,069 iPhones under warranty claims, and got back close to 1,500 new iPhones as replacement units. With a loss of $600 per iPhone, Apple calculates that it lost close to $900,000 USD which roughly translates to about Rs 6.25 INR crores.
The rest of the iPhones, in case you’re wondering, were rejected for tampering, and they were sent back with letters explaining why the warranty claims were declined.
The federal prosecutors have charged Jiang with trafficking counterfeit goods and wire fraud. Zhou, on the other hand, was accused of submitting false information on export documentation. The agents got tipped of this fraud in April 2017 when they opened five suspicious packages enroute from Hong Kong containing phones with counterfeit marking. In their defense, both students have claimed that they didn’t know the phones were counterfeits. But, c’mon, no one’s going to buy that.
