A disaffected erstwhile courier has conceded culpability in a conspiracy to defraud DoorDash of upwards of $2.5 million through the orchestration of phantom deliveries, federal prosecutors have asserted.

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

Devagiri, 30, a Newport Beach, California resident, has conceded his complicity, alongside three confederates, in a scheme executed throughout 2020 and 2021, designed to defraud a San Francisco-domiciled delivery enterprise, according to pronouncements from federal prosecutorial authorities.

Prosecutors allege that Devagiri exploited customer accounts to initiate substantial orders, subsequently leveraging an employee’s credentials to surreptitiously access DoorDash's proprietary software, enabling the manual reassignment of said orders to a network of driver accounts under his and his confederates' dominion; furthermore, officials contend that Devagiri orchestrated the fraudulent reporting of fictitious deliveries from these compromised accounts, manipulating DoorDash's computer infrastructure to disburse payments for these nonexistent services to the bogus driver entities.

Devagiri then leveraged DoorDash's proprietary software, illicitly manipulating order statuses from "delivered" to "in process," subsequently reassigning these orders, via manual intervention, to a network of collusive driver accounts under his and his associates' control, thereby perpetuating the fraudulent scheme, according to prosecutorial findings.

The erstwhile employee, enmeshed in the fraudulent scheme, entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in November 2023, conceding his complicity in the aforementioned artifice, according to prosecutorial sources.

Devagiri, the third defendant to be adjudged culpable for his instrumental involvement in the aforementioned conspiracy, now confronts a potential custodial sentence of up to two decades and a pecuniary penalty not exceeding $250,000; his reappearance before the court is slated for September 16th.