Five individuals involved in a scheme that defrauded DoorDash of approximately $2.5 million have been sentenced to a total of six years in prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California on Tuesday .
DoorDash, a San Francisco-based food delivery company, operates an online platform that enables customers to order food and groceries, which are then delivered by independent drivers. Between November 2020 and February 2021, the five defendants exploited weaknesses in this system to receive payments for deliveries that never actually took place, federal prosecutors said.
The defendants — Matheus Duarte, Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri, Manaswi Mandadapu, and Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, all residents of California, along with Hari Vamsi Anne of Texas — collaborated to execute the fraudulent scheme. According to prosecutors, they created numerous fake customer accounts and fake driver accounts on the DoorDash platform.
Using employee login credentials, the group manipulated DoorDash’s internal software to manually assign delivery orders from the fraudulent customer accounts to the fake driver accounts they controlled. Once assigned, the defendants falsely marked the orders as “delivered,” allowing them to collect payments for transactions that never occurred.
To maximize their profits, the conspirators would then reclassify those same orders as “in progress,” enabling them to repeat the process — in some cases hundreds of times — and continue collecting payouts. Through this repeated manipulation of the system, the group obtained more than $2.5 million in fraudulent payments.
All five defendants pleaded guilty to their roles in the conspiracy. Their individual sentences range from three years of supervised release to as much as 25 months in federal prison.
In a statement issued last year, a DoorDash spokesperson said the company detected fraudulent activity on its platform in 2021 and immediately referred the matter to federal law enforcement authorities. The spokesperson added that the company appreciates the efforts of law enforcement in holding those responsible accountable through the federal court system.