A disaffected ex-courier has entered a guilty plea, admitting to orchestrating a sophisticated conspiracy with accomplices to defraud DoorDash of upwards of $2.5 million through the submission of spurious delivery claims for services never rendered, according to pronouncements from federal prosecuting attorneys.

Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in the San Jose federal court to one count of conspiracy to perpetrate wire fraud, as divulged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Devagiri, 30, a Newport Beach, California resident, has confessed to orchestrating a scheme with three accomplices throughout 2020 and 2021 to systematically defraud a San Francisco-domiciled delivery firm, as elucidated by federal prosecuting attorneys.

Prosecutors alleged that Devagiri exploited customer accounts to initiate substantial orders, subsequently leveraging an employee's credentials to surreptitiously access DoorDash's proprietary software, enabling the clandestine reassignment of said orders to a network of driver accounts under his and his accomplices' dominion; officials further contend that Devagiri then orchestrated the falsification of delivery confirmations for these orders via the fraudulent accounts, thereby manipulating DoorDash's computational infrastructure to remunerate these illicit accounts for phantom deliveries.

Devagiri, according to the prosecution, would then exploit the DoorDash API to retroactively manipulate order statuses, transitioning them from "delivered" back to "in process," and subsequently reallocate these resurrected orders to collusive driver accounts under his and his accomplices' control, thereby perpetuating the fraudulent scheme.

The erstwhile employee, embroiled in the aforementioned fraudulent enterprise, entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in November 2023, and further conceded his complicity in the elaborate scheme, according to statements issued by the prosecuting counsel.

Devagiri, the third defendant adjudicated culpable for his complicity in the aforementioned conspiracy, now confronts a potential sentence of two decades' incarceration and a pecuniary penalty not exceeding $250,000, with his reappearance before the court scheduled for September 16th.