Indian-origin man in California pleads guilty to scamming DoorDash of $2.5M

30-year-old Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri, a Southern Californian man of Indian-origin, has pleaded guilty for conspiring to steal around $2.5 million from food delivery company DoorDash. Devagiri and three others were indicted by a federal jury in August and were arrested in October, Federal prosecutors said, earlier this week, that Devagiri has pleaded guilty. Devagiri faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. He is scheduled to appear for a status hearing in the case on September 16.

How did Devagiri scam DoorDash?

Between 2020 and 2021, Devagiri and three others scammed the delivery company.

Devagiri used to work as a DoorDash delivery driver. He devised this method, where he used customer accounts to place high-value orders on the app. Then he used an employee's credentials to access DoorDash software and manually reassign the orders to driver accounts that he and his co-conspirators controlled.

Then, the fraudulent driver accounts that were in their control reported that the orders were delivered. In reality, those orders were not delivered because those orders were not even real. Then Devagiri used the software to pay the fraudulent drivers for those non-existent deliveries.

Then Devagiri used the software to change the orders from "delivered" status to "in process". "This procedure usually took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders," the US Attorney's Office said in a statement.

Co-defendant Manaswi Mandadapu pled guilty to the same charge on May 6. A third defendant, Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn of Solano County, pled guilty in 2023 after being separately charged in the case.