Together with their co-conspirators, the 34-year-old scammers, Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue, squeezed Apple for about $2.5 million, as employees for years failed to detect what the DOJ described as a rather "sophisticated" scheme between 2017 and 2019.

They then submitted the fake iPhones, with spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers, including the Apple Store