According to federal prosecutors, a former food delivery driver has pleaded guilty to conspiring with accomplices to defraud DoorDash of over $2.5 million by submitting claims for deliveries that were never effectuated.

According to the United States Attorney's Office, Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in San Jose federal court to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a conviction that underscores the Justice Department's commitment to prosecuting complex financial crimes involving electronic communications.

Devagiri, a 30-year-old hailing from Newport Beach, California, has confessed to colluding with three accomplices in a scheme to defraud a San Francisco-based delivery firm throughout 2020 and 2021, a concerted effort indicative of premeditated financial malfeasance.

The prosecution alleges that Devagiri orchestrated a sophisticated scheme, leveraging compromised customer accounts to initiate substantial orders, subsequently exploiting an employee's credentials to infiltrate DoorDash's software and manually reassign these orders to complicit delivery personnel accounts under his control; furthermore, Devagiri purportedly manipulated said fraudulent accounts to register deliveries as complete, thereby subverting DoorDash's computational infrastructure to disburse payments for phantom deliveries to these same collusive entities.

According to the prosecution, Devagiri purportedly exploited the DoorDash software by iteratively manipulating order statuses from "delivered" back to "in progress," followed by the manual reassignment of said orders to complicit delivery personnel accounts under his dominion.

The former employee implicated in the fraud case pleaded guilty in November 2023 to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, acknowledging his complicity in the scheme and thereby confirming his adherence to its illicit objectives.

Devagiri, the third defendant indicted for his alleged complicity in the present solicitation, faces a potential sentence of up to twenty years' imprisonment and a $250,000 fine, and is slated to appear for trial on September 16th.