Five people, including two from the Bay Area, have been sentenced to prison terms and restitution for their parts in a strange fraud scheme involving the creation of sham driver and customer accounts on the DoorDash platform.
The public learned of the case in October 2024, when four individuals were arrested in connection with a conspiracy to defraud DoorDash. The scheme involved the use of fake customer and driver accounts, and the creation of fake orders for which the drivers would be paid using inside access to the backend of DoorDash's systems.
The arrestees were 30-year-old Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri and 29-year-old Manaswi Mandadapu, both in Orange County, along with 30-year-old Hari Vamsi Anne of Cypress, Texas, and 29-year-old Matheus Duarte, a Brazilian national who was arrested in Mountain House, California, and who now resides in Hayward.
Those arrests came after a onetime employee of DoorDash, Dixon, California resident Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, had already been separately charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a federal criminal case filed in September 2022 — clearly after the fraud had been caught by DoorDash.
According to federal prosecutors, Bottenhorn had briefly worked for DoorDash in 2020, and used his knowledge of and credentials for the system's backend to launch the scheme. The other four defendents, including former DoorDash driver Devagiri, worked to create fraudulent driver accounts and fictitious customers accounts, ultimately stealing over $2.5 million from DoorDash by placing and fulfilling high-value food orders that never existed.
The scheme went on for some number of months between 2020 and 2021.
"Devagiri would then use DoorDash software to change the [completed] orders from 'delivered' status to 'in process' status and manually reassign the orders to driver accounts he and others controlled, beginning the process again," the Justice Department said. "This procedure usually took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders."
Bottenhorn pleaded guilty in November 2023 and clearly gave up the names of the other four involved. Devagiri and Mandadapu both pleaded guilty earlier this year.
On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announced that the quintet had all been sentenced, with Bottenhorn sentenced to time served. He is also required to pay $2,127,216 in restitution.
Duarte received a sentence of 25 months in federal prison, Anne 22 months, Devagiri 21 months, and Mandadapu 12 months.
Duarte, Anne, Devagiri and Mandadapu also must each pay $2,590,195 in restitution.
Previously: Man Convicted Of Defrauding Bay Area Investors Over Fake Space Tech Company — For A Mere $50K
