A former DoorDash delivery driver plead guilty this week to a wire fraud conspiracy to which he conspired to scam DoorDash out of more than $2.5 million, the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of California said on Tuesday. He and other individuals did it over several months through fake customer accounts, phantom deliveries, driver accounts, and access to DoorDash employee credentials.
This is how the Attorney’s office explains the scam. The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, manually routed pricey orders from an unauthorized customer account in the DoorDash app. He then used DoorDash employee login credentials to manually attribute the orders to driver accounts he and the others had created. Devagiri would then finalize the undelivered orders and trigger DoorDash’s system to compensate the driver accounts. Then he would come back and turn those same orders to “in process” again and repeat the whole process. This “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” states the US Attorney’s Office.
The driver, and three others, were charged in October for a bogus deliveries scam.
Devagiri could face 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and is next due for a status hearing in September. He and four others were indicted in August on charges they participated in the scheme, which prosecutors allege was conducted between November 2020 and February 2021. The insider credentials of DoorDash employee Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, whose were stolen to use, were charged individually in 2022 and pleaded guilty a year later, the Attorney’s Office reported in October.