“A Seattle-area fraudster who made millions illegally shipping Apple products to the Middle East has been sentenced to five years in federal prison,” Levi Pulkkinen reports for Seattle Pi. “Maziar Rezakhani already lost his high-end penthouse and Ferrari collection for defrauding Apple and the IRS. On Monday he learned how much of his life he would lose to prison.”
“Rezakhani, now 27, ultimately admitted to fraud crimes related to his dubious, multi-million dollar iPhone exporting operation. Pleading guilty in August, Rezakhani had been under investigation for nearly two years before federal agents came calling in October 2015,” Pulkkinen reports. “By then, though, the damage was done. Prosecutors say the young millionaire’s fraud helped break Foundation Bank, which loaned Rezakhani some of the millions he blew on Italian sports cars and his penthouse apartment.”
“Federal investigators determined the University of Washington grad-turned-millionaire faces shipped thousands of Apple products to Dubai and elsewhere,” Pulkkinen reports. “While doing so, Rezakhani stole at least $3 million through a variety of frauds related to the business.”
Tons more criminal activity detailed in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Only five years? White collar crime sure pays – just ask Microsoft, Google, and Samsung, to name just three.
Makes us want to rewatch War Dogs.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “TJ” for the heads up.]
5 years? Dude got more than that for stealing a slice of pizza. Amazing, the law it is.
I have been saying for years than punishments are far from equal. Take the Enron situation, or the bank fraud that led to the economic crash in 2007 – the criminals who caused those epic failures caused some people great loss, and some of those people committed suicide. But very few were prosecuted. The same is true of the scammers who bilk people for money – money that many people cannot afford to lose. I have no compassion at all for those fraudsters and scammers.
It is as I have long said. Rich drug addicts go to rehab and poor ones go to jail.
Tape your dog’s mouth shut and get 5 years.
It’s too bad he did that against Apple. He should have thought more along the lines of acts against humanity and attacked someone else. That way he would have found himself well above the law with the famous obummer defense for the shrub ” we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
This is what happens when the feds don’t get their cut.