Together with their co-conspirators, the 34-year-old scammers, Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue, squeezed Apple for about $2.5 million, as employees for years failed to detect what the DOJ described as a rather "sophisticated" scheme between 2017 and 2019.

They then submitted the fake iPhones, with spoofed serial numbers and/or IMEI numbers, to Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers, including the Apple Store

Hoatian Sun and Pengfei Xue are on their way to prison after the Justice Department said their iPhone repair scheme cost the tech giant millions in losses.

The Justice Department said Thursday two Chinese men who tried to defraud Apple, Inc. have been sentenced for trying to defraud Apple out of millions of dollars worth of iPhones.

Haotian Sun, 34, a Chinese citizen living in Baltimore, Maryland, was sentenced to 57 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $1,072,200 in restitution to Apple plus a forfeiture money judgment of $53,610.

Two people have been sent to prison over a scam which reportedly cost tech giant Apple some $2.5 million. Haotian Sun and Pengfei Xue ran a scam posing as a repair shop that sent counterfeit phones to the business.

The tech giant suffered a loss of more than $2.5 million as a result of the scam, that unfolded in the United States.

The pair submitted counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repair as a way to get Apple to exchange them for genuine replacements.

Two individuals who conned Apple into replacing fake faulty iPhones with real ones, have been sentenced to years in prison.