A former DoorDash delivery driver pleaded guilty this week to conspiracy to a wire fraud conspiracy that scammed DoorDash out of over $2.5 million, the US Attorneyโs Office in Californiaโs Northern District announced on Tuesday. He and others made it happen over a period of months using fake customer accounts, deliveries that never happened, driver accounts, and access to DoorDash employee credentials.
Hereโs how the Attorneyโs office describes the scheme. The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDashโs system to pay the driver accounts. Then heโd switch those same orders back to โin processโ and do it all over again. Doing this โtook less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,โ writes the US Attorneyโs Office.
Devagiri faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and is scheduled for a status hearing in September. He and four others were charged in August for their roles in the scheme, which prosecutors say was carried out between November 2020 and February 2021. The DoorDash employee whose insider credentials they used, Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, was charged separately in 2022 and pleaded guilty the following year, the Attorneyโs Office wrote in October.
