LOS ANGELES – Five people said to be part of a sophisticated fraud ring that siphoned millions of dollars from DoorDash through a high-tech “phantom delivery” scheme were sentenced earlier this week.
According to federal officials, the group leveraged insider access to trigger over $2.5 million in fraudulent payments for services that never existed.
What we know:
Between November 2020 and February 2021, five men—Matheus Duarte, Hari Vamsi Anne, Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri, Manaswi Mandadapu, and Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn—coordinated a multi-layered attack on DoorDash’s platform, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
By creating fake customer and driver accounts and using insider access to the company’s computer systems, they assigned orders to themselves and manipulated data to show that individual orders had been fulfilled hundreds…