A former DoorDash delivery driver admitted guilt this week to being part of a wire fraud conspiracy that defrauded DoorDash of more than $2.5 million, according to an announcement from the US Attorney’s Office in California’s Northern District on Tuesday. Over several months, he and others orchestrated the scheme using fake customer accounts, sham deliveries, driver accounts, and access to DoorDash employee credentials.
According to the Attorney’s office, the driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, initiated the fraud by placing costly orders from a bogus customer account on the DoorDash app. Afterward, using employee credentials, he manually directed these orders to driver accounts that he and his associates had created. He would then mark the undelivered orders as complete, prompting DoorDash’s system to compensate the driver accounts. Subsequently, he’d revert the orders back to “in process” and repeat the cycle. The US Attorney’s Office notes that this process “took less than five minutes and was repeated hundreds of times for numerous orders.”
Devagiri could face a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, with a status hearing scheduled for September. He and four others were indicted in August for their involvement in the plot, which prosecutors claim occurred from November 2020 to February 2021. The DoorDash employee whose credentials were exploited, Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, was charged separately in 2022 and confessed the following year, as stated by the Attorney’s Office in October.
