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Man Who Tricked Apple into Replacing 1,500 Fake iPhones Pleads Guilty to Trafficking Counterfeit Goods
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Former Apple Store employee here. Short answer, we knew a long time ago. Apple legal takes a long time to get **** done. He either wasn’t the only one with an operation like this or he had dozens of people working for him all over the west coast.
Quan Jiang gets graded A+ on the graduate-level course "How to employ corrupt practices for lucre".
[Now, from lessons-learned, and as part of "community-service from jail", he can run a Master-class to teach our Executive-office officials how to hone-in their current skills and avoid jail time.]
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As you can se from a lot of the responses to this thread, robbing a corporation is the most immoral thing a person can do. He'd have been better off robbing the poor; he'd have got a small fine and a CEO job on Wall Street.
Hey so ex-Apple tech here, so yeah we actually used to get these type of situations almost hourly on a daily basis. On a normal 4hr shift I would assist anywhere from 12-23 customers; now what would happen in our store is we would get 4-7 specific customers of asian descent that would create a genius bar appointment every hour (on top of making walk in reservations as well) now it would go one of 2 ways we would get some that were confident and would try and chat us up and tell us that the phone just stopped turning on and that its under warranty or they would pretend that they spoke little to no english and say that the phone is boot looping from the startup and doesnt work. At first when it would happen we would just rapid swap it out due to our stores policy that only geniuses could open the device meanwhile regular techs would have to partner with a genius to open the device due to them not having the full certifications necessary to open the phones so more often than not they would just swap the device because it was a hassle to get a genius to help you since they were usually busy in a repair queue for shattered screens, etc. So after a bit we would notice that the same people would come in under different names despite them obviously being the same person and wearing the exact same clothes (even leading to a customer service issue with one of my coworkers being declared racist for trying to call them out as being the same person across their multiple genius bar reservations). Anyways after about a month or so, Apple would start to flag the phones through our systems and even implemented a new tool in our troubleshooting steps, eventually even sometimes going as far to having us call corporate and give them as much information as possible about the customer and would make us swap out their phones. Eventually we were told and found out that Apple had actually been aware of the situation the entire time it was going on and was just having us play along so that they could build a massive case against the scammers.
TL: DR
This happened at the Apple Store I worked at and we knew that the phones were fake but corporate would make us swap out the phones and get as much info of the people doing it so that they could press charges on the scammers that would come to our stores every day
TL: DR
This happened at the Apple Store I worked at and we knew that the phones were fake but corporate would make us swap out the phones and get as much info of the people doing it so that they could press charges on the scammers that would come to our stores every day
I'm pretty sure that Apple no longer immediately replaces iPhones when they don't power on. They are required to be sent to their repair center for further observation.
I’m not arguing but hundreds of defective iPhones from one address should be mildly suspicious as fail rates shouldn’t be that high.
What is the motivation for giving him less than 1/3rd the jail time, and 1/10th of the fine (provided he returns a car google suggests has a resale value under $30k), which works out to about 1/5th of what he stole? He committed 1500ish counts of fraud and another 1500ish counts of attempted fraud. There are people out there serving longer sentences for much lesser crimes.
No iPhone is worth $600. The judge did the right thing in identifying what Apple lost, not what customers were willing to shell out.
I see that also. What people are forgetting about asking this is that Apple doesn't print the serial number on the outside of the phone anymore. It used to be printed outside, and even a few models ago it was on the SIM tray. There is no way to see the SN if it doesn't power on. I am sure it is printed on the board inside it, but obviously Apple didn't have anyone take it in back to open up.
None of those numbers are printed on the back of the phone. Read the article. All the "phones" were ones that arrived non-operable. They just have to look convincingly like an iPhone in the off state. It is possible (not easy, but possible) for someone to make an iPhone-shaped box (er, right rectangular prism with rounded corners, constructed of metal and glass and some ink) that looks convincingly like a real iPhone (keep in mind that real iPhones also come out of a factory in China), especially if your (evil) motivation is, "if we build a very convincing non-functional replica for $50-$100 of materials and effort, we get a real replacement iPhone worth upwards of $600 in return" (and if you set up an assembly line to make the fakes, it probably costs you less than that).
Also keep in mind that the Apple employees accepting the returned "iPhones" are expecting to see iPhones - they're not expecting to be handed a convincing fake. The customer doesn't start off by saying, "is this a real iPhone?" or "I assert that this is totally a real iPhone", they say, "my beloved iPhone won't turn on and my flight leaves in 90 minutes!" They frame the conversation around the points that it won't turn on and they're in a huge important hurry for other reasons.
And can you imagine how most customers would react if they brought in a legit dead iPhone and the Genius said, "hold on, we're going to have to take this in back and spend 20 minutes determining if it's a real iPhone or if you're committing fraud"? The customer would be outraged, their friends would be outraged, the media would be outraged (hundreds of repetitions "Apple accuses local upstanding citizen of fraud!" spilling into the national news), MacRumors forum denizens would be outraged. Apple's public image would take a hit.
It's taking advantage of Apple's policies that the customer is (almost) always right. Someone brings in their bricked "iPhone" and they're convincingly upset and need it replaced right away for <random made-up reason>, and Apple replaces it in a hurry (without being able to turn it on to check it out) because they want industry-leading customer satisfaction.
$895K/1500 is about 600$ per phone, so it's pretty close to retail pricing at the time of the fraud. For puroposes of the trial I would guess they use retail to calculate the impact so as to get the maximim possible sentence and induce him to accept a plea.
IMEIs to this day are still printed on the sim trays. Retail also uses a tool to read serial numbers from devices that don’t turn on
"And Jiang must forfeit his black 2015 Mercedes-Benz CLA 250 coupe."
What a great life this guy must have lived, driving around Corvallis in his Mercedes.
What a great life this guy must have lived, driving around Corvallis in his Mercedes.
A few years back my 7+ stopped working. Reading some comments here made me first wonder if I was thought to be a scammer. But then I remembered I showed up with my receipt, box, etc. It was a legit phone and just stopped working one day.
It's worse than you think, here is the original article: https://www.justice.gov/usao-or/pr/...lty-trafficking-counterfeit-iphones-hong-kong I can NOT believe that more wasn't done!
With great respect to the Justice Department but, China is STEALING American technology, killing American innovation, robbing American people, and you made a low-end plea deal with one of them? What has China done with Americas that steal, A LOT WORSE! This is not a lead by example situation... China isn't going to stop unless we use the FULL extent of the law!
Sad, really freaking sad because I have to deal with Counterfeits regularly with 90% coming from China, not Vietnam, not Russia, not EU but China, PERIOD.
With great respect to the Justice Department but, China is STEALING American technology, killing American innovation, robbing American people, and you made a low-end plea deal with one of them? What has China done with Americas that steal, A LOT WORSE! This is not a lead by example situation... China isn't going to stop unless we use the FULL extent of the law!
Sad, really freaking sad because I have to deal with Counterfeits regularly with 90% coming from China, not Vietnam, not Russia, not EU but China, PERIOD.
the article says they were shipped to him from Hong Kong. they likely had someone feeding them serials to put on fake enclosures or fake sim card trays. best buy etc caught folks taking photos of serial numbers from shipment boxes a couple of years ago. there might still be folks doing that sort of thing.
this is why all that 'we have to ship it out' stuff started about a year or so ago. and all the extra tests with the weird dongles. apple created a way to read the serial number from the logic board if there's still a tiny trickle charge so if their system verifies the serial is correct they replace it in store, if not then it goes out to be opened and examined for missing or fake parts and just the board is replaced etc.
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that's old practice now but this has been an ongoing thing for a while so yes he probably spread enough of the phones around multiple stores and cities that he could get a ton of replacements when this was the game.
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the geniuses don't say it like that but they do examine the phones way more than they used to. they have testing devices for reading the serial and if it doesn't read the computer system will lock them out of doing a replacement if it's under warranty. they have to send it to a center that can remove and test the logic board to see if it's fake etc.
