SAN JOSE — A former delivery driver pleaded guilty to conspiracy Tuesday in federal court for attempting to steal $2.5 million from DoorDash by placing orders, manually assigning the orders to driver accounts he controlled and falsely marking them as completed, according to federal authorities.
Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri, a 30-year-old from Newport Beach, was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud after being indicted by a federal grand jury alongside three others in August 2024. He is the third defendant to be convicted in the case, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
In 2020 and 2021, Devagiri worked as a driver for DoorDash, which is headquartered in San Francisco, prosecutors said. With others, he would place high-priced orders from customer accounts, then use an employee’s credentials to access DoorDash software and manually reassign those orders to driver accounts held by him and others.
Using the driver accounts, Devagiri would falsely report that those orders had been delivered and cue DoorDash’s computer systems to pay the drivers for the fake deliveries, prosecutors said. He would then manually change the status of the order back to “in process,” reassign them to the driver accounts and repeat the process up to hundreds of times for each order. Each process took under five minutes, prosecutors added.
Devagiri’s scheme resulted in DoorDash paying out more than $2.5 million in fraudulent payments, prosecutors said.
Devagiri was arrested alongside three others on Oct. 4, according to the Department of Justice. He first appeared in court in Santa Ana and was released on bond.
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Co-defendant Manaswi Mandadapu also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud on May 6, prosecutors added.
Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn of Solano County pleaded guilty on Nov. 7, 2023 to a separate charge. Bottenhorn had briefly worked for DoorDash in 2020, and the group accessed the DoorDash computer systems using his credentials, prosecutors said.
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