.jpeg "Former DoorDash Driver Pleads Guilty in $2.59 Million Fraud Scheme Using Fake Accounts and Insider Access")
Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri, 30, of Newport Beach, California, admitted on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The plea comes after a federal grand jury charged Devagiri and three others — Manaswi Mandadapu, Matheus Duarte, and Hari Vamsi Anne — in August for orchestrating the large-scale scam.
According to prosecutors, Devagiri participated in the scheme while working as a DoorDash delivery driver between 2020 and 2021. The group created numerous fake customer and driver accounts to place high-value food orders across Northern California.
Using login credentials of DoorDash employees, including Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, a former employee from Solano County, the group accessed DoorDash’s internal systems. They manually reassigned legitimate orders to their fake driver accounts. Once marked as "delivered"—even though the food was never delivered—the system automatically issued payments through a third-party vendor.
In many cases, the conspirators would use stolen credentials to reset the order statuses from “delivered” back to “in process,” allowing them to rerun the scam repeatedly. Prosecutors said the entire cycle took less than five minutes per order and was executed hundreds of times, generating over $2.59 million in fraudulent payouts.
Tyler Bottenhorn, whose credentials were used in the scam, was separately charged and pleaded guilty in November 2023.
Devagiri is the third defendant to plead guilty in the case and is scheduled to be sentenced on September 16, 2025. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The case underscores the vulnerabilities in app-based delivery platforms and how insider access can be exploited to carry out large-scale cyber-enabled fraud.
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Cybercrime in World
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