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A con artist who got some of the biggest tech companies in the world to send him replacement equipment has been sentenced to seven years and eight months in a US prison.
Justin David May, who is 31 years old, scammed Cisco out of almost $3.5 million worth of hardware in just one year. He did this by using stolen hardware serial numbers, a lot of fake websites and online identities, social engineering, and a network of friends.
The thief got away with 139 Surface laptops worth $364,761. Lenovo US also lost 193 replacement hard drives worth $143,000, and APC, which used to be called American Power Conversion, lost a few uninterruptible power supplies. May admitted to 42 counts of mail fraud, 10 counts of money laundering, three counts of transporting goods obtained through fraud across state lines, and two counts of not paying taxes.
“May and his partners broke the warranty system, which is meant to protect honest customers. “They made money from this complicated scheme while cheating these companies and the federal government,” said Michael Driscoll, who is in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia division.
“Thanks to the hard work and teamwork of the FBI and IRS, this sentencing shows people who try to make money through fraud and deception that there are serious consequences for this kind of behavior.”
In the biggest scam against Cisco, which began in April 2016, court documents [PDF] filed in a federal district court in Pennsylvania say that May and his group set up web domains and email addresses that looked like cisco.com user IDs and stole serial numbers from real equipment.
Then, they used these details to trick Cisco staff into sending replacements for equipment that the thieves didn’t actually own, like a Cisco Catalyst 3850-48P-E Switch worth about $21,000 at the time and two Cisco ASR 9001 routers worth more than $100,000 for the pair. So, the scammers got away with the new gear, and the tech giant never saw the supposed broken equipment that was being replaced.
Having trouble with systems
It looks like both Microsoft and Lenovo were successful with the same scam. In the court papers, it says that May was good at making up problems that couldn’t be fixed through a remote connection or software update and seemed serious enough to need a new unit. Also, his team used digital tools to trick support staff by changing pictures of what they said were their equipment and serial numbers.
Once UPS or FedEx delivered the hardware, the broken kit didn’t exist anymore, so the companies never got it back. In the meantime, the packages were picked up and sold on eBay and other sites for secondhand goods, and the money was kept. Some of Microsoft’s hardware was sent to Singapore so that it could be sold there.
These thieves didn’t have much intelligence. He put some checks in his own bank account, but he also went to places that cashed checks to get cash. The Feds say some of this money was used to buy a 2017 BMW Coupe, and they found a lot of cash at his house.
The trick seems to have worked because they stuck with it and made it fit the person. To get the kit, people had to ask for help hundreds of times, and more than half of them were successful. At least 252 of the 368 false warranty claims that Cisco customers made were accepted, while only 23 of the 216 warranty claims that Lenovo customers made for their ThinkPad hard drives were turned down.
“Customers are supposed to be made whole by warranties, which do this by replacing broken items.” “They aren’t meant to be used by con artists who want to steal money,” Jennifer Williams, who is acting as a US attorney, said.
“Warranty fraud isn’t a crime that doesn’t hurt anyone.” Instead, companies with thousands of employees stand to lose millions of dollars, which is what happened in this case. The defendant’s plan really hurt people, so he will spend a long time in prison for what he did.
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