How two students would have forced Apple to send them thousands of free phones?

According to court documents reported by the Oregonian, two Oregon students are accused of being pioneered in thousands of free iPhones.

Yangyang Zhou and Quan Jiang, Chinese engineering students in the United States holding a student visa, are accused of having set up a program that cost Apple hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here, according to the federal prosecutors, how they proceeded:

A partner in China sent parcels of 20 to 30 counterfeit iPhones to Jiang's men or friends and relatives, whom he paid to use their addresses around Oregon. None of the phones could turn on. Jiang and Zhou, his alleged accomplice, were picking up the phones and bringing the phones in person to Apple for repair or replacement or submitting warranty claims using Apple's online support service and shipping the phones to Apple. Apple.

Apple technicians inspect the phones when they are sent to them for repair to determine if the phones are genuine Apple products, according to the Oregonian. But because the phones sent by Jiang to Apple did not want to turn on, Apple often could not review them. They would go ahead and send a replacement phone.

Jiang allegedly returned the real iPhones to China, where his associates sold them for a few hundred dollars each. They would pay Jiang's share of the profits back to his mother, who could then transfer the money to a bank account that Jiang could access in the United States.

According to court documents, Apple linked Jiang Jiang to 3,069 complaints related to phones that would not light up. It replaced 1,493 of these phones. (Zhou is accused of having made over 200 false warranty claims.) The company estimated to have lost nearly US $ 900,000.

Federal agents began investigating the case in April 2017 after US Customs and Border Protection seized several seemingly counterfeit iPhone shipments. Apple said it sent cease and desist orders to Jiang in June and July 2017. Jiang and Zhou's attorneys claimed that the two did not know that they were participating in an illegal ploy and thought that the phones that were delivered to them were real iPhones.

Jiang, an engineering student at Linn Benton Community College, is charged with smuggling and wire fraud. Zhou, who has just finished his studies at Oregon State University, is accused of providing false or misleading information in an export declaration.