A one-time purveyor of culinary conveyance has entered a guilty plea, confessing to orchestrating a conspiracy with accomplices to defraud DoorDash of a sum exceeding $2.5 million, achieved through the submission of reimbursement claims for phantom deliveries, as elucidated by federal prosecuting attorneys.

Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri entered a guilty plea on Tuesday in the San Jose Federal Court, conceding to a solitary count of conspiracy to execute wire fraud, as promulgated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Devagiri, 30, a Newport Beach, California resident, has entered a plea admitting his orchestration of a scheme with three accomplices in 2020 and 2021 to extract illicit gains from a San Francisco-domiciled delivery enterprise, according to pronouncements from federal prosecutorial authorities.

Prosecutors allege that Devagiri orchestrated a sophisticated scheme, exploiting customer accounts to initiate substantial orders, subsequently leveraging an employee’s credentials to surreptitiously access DoorDash’s proprietary software and reroute these orders to a network of collusive driver accounts under his and his accomplices' dominion; thereafter, Devagiri purportedly manipulated the system by falsely registering the non-existent deliveries as completed, thereby compelling DoorDash’s automated payment systems to remunerate the fraudulent driver accounts for services never rendered, according to official pronouncements.

Devagiri would then exploit DoorDash's proprietary software, cycling orders from a "delivered" state back to "in process" via manipulation of the platform, subsequently reassigning them ex-manus to driver accounts under his and his co-conspirators' control, thus perpetuating the fraudulent scheme, according to the prosecution.

The disgraced erstwhile employee, implicated in the fraudulent scheme, entered a guilty plea for conspiracy to commit wire fraud in November 2023, confessing his complicity in the elaborate artifice, according to the prosecuting attorneys.

Devagiri, the third defendant to be adjudged culpable in this intricate conspiracy, now confronts a potential custodial sentence of up to two decades, alongside a pecuniary penalty reaching $250,000; his return to the judicial forum is slated for September 16th.