TECHY CRIMINAL OF THE WEEK: FAKED EQUIPMENT PROBLEMS TO GET REPLACEMENTS TO SELL
by Hazed
A techy criminal who defrauded Cisco and Microsoft is facing a theoretical maximum sentence of over a thousand years in jail if he is convicted. Wow, he must have done something really terrible!
What Justin David May did was to fake problems with computing and networking gear that he didn’t actually own, in order to trick the tech companies into sending him replacements, which he then sold. He gained millions of dollars in this scam.
The 28-year-old from Wilmington, Delaware, got hold of product serial numbers for Cisco and Microsoft hardware, then set up a series of websites to make his fake customer email addresses look legit. He paid for the websites with Bitcoin to conceal the domain registrations.
Using the product numbers, he and his unnamed associates put in product support requests for invented problems that they “knew would prevent the [Cisco support] engineers from solving the supposed problems through troubleshooting and would necessarily require the replacement of the supposedly faulty computer hardware.” They did the same with Microsoft products.
They used doctored photos of the products they claimed to own, to make their equipment return requests more convincing.
The companies sent out replacement hardware in the expectation the faulty equipment would be returned. Of course, it never was because it didn’t exist.
May and his colleagues are said to have obtained 169 Cisco switches and routers worth an estimated $2,344,860, and 139 Microsoft Surface devices worth about $393,000. They sold these through eBay and through equipment resellers based in New Jersey.
If he is convicted, that theoretical maximum sentence of 1,029 years in prison is more likely to be around 11 to 14 years, but he will also get hit with a hefty fine.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/29/fake_cisco_microsoft_resell/
