A erstwhile food courier has entered a guilty plea, admitting to collusion in a scheme to defraud DoorDash of over $2.5 million through the orchestration of phantom deliveries, as averred by federal prosecuting attorneys.

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

Devagiri, 30, a Newport Beach, California resident, has entered a plea admitting his complicity, alongside three unnamed confederates, in a scheme perpetrated throughout 2020 and 2021, designed to defraud a San Francisco-based delivery service, according to pronouncements from federal prosecutors.

Prosecutors alleged that Devagiri exploited customer accounts to orchestrate high-value order placements, subsequently leveraging an employee's credentials to surreptitiously access DoorDash's proprietary software, enabling the manual reassignment of said orders to a network of collusive driver accounts under his and his associates' control, after which Devagiri purportedly engineered the fraudulent driver accounts to report fictitious deliveries, thus manipulating DoorDash's computer systems to disburse payments for these nonexistent transactions, according to official pronouncements.

Devagiri would then exploit DoorDash's proprietary software, illicitly toggling order statuses from "delivered" back to "in process," subsequently reassigning them manually to driver accounts under his and his accomplices' dominion, thereby perpetuating the fraudulent cycle, according to prosecutorial findings.

In November 2023, the erstwhile employee implicated in the fraudulent scheme entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, further conceding his complicity in the aforementioned illicit enterprise, according to prosecuting counsel.

Devagiri, the third defendant to be adjudicated culpable in this intricate conspiracy, faces a potential custodial sentence of up to two decades, coupled with a pecuniary penalty not exceeding $250,000; his *pro forma* return to court is slated for September 16th.