Amazon has had a fair share of customers scamming and taking advantage of the world’s largest e-commerce company but one of their own employees pled guilty for stealing right out of their warehouse. A former disgraced 27-year-old warehouse manager Douglas Wright admitted to stealing computer parts from the Amazon warehouse and selling the stolen goods to another wholesaler.
Wright abused his power as an Amazon employee for personal gain selling over $273,000 worth of computer parts to a wholesaler in California. In the ongoing court case, Wright pled guilt to charges of mail fraud admitting to stealing various high-value computer parts like GPUs, internal hard drives, and processors.
Wright was the warehouse manager for the North Carolina-based Amazon fulfillment center with accusations stemming back from June 2020 to September 2021. How did he get away with stealing over $270,000 worth of products from Amazon?
Wright would access Amazon’s inventory tracking system to locate specific packages that he tracked down, took home, then sold to a wholesaler in California. Wright now faces the penalties of mail fraud with a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison with an additional fine of $250,000. The case is being overseen by the Justice Department and this isn’t the first time someone took advantage of Amazon for personal gain.
In December 2021, a customer pled guilty for defrauding Amazon from 2017-2020 of over $300,000 taking advantage of their immediate refund policy. Court documents reveal that the 34-year-old customer, Farhaad Riyaz, opened multiple Amazon accounts to purchase expensive products and have them shipped to his residence.
Riyaz scammed Amazon by claiming he received orders he claimed were too late or was not as described online that would initiate a nearly immediate refund. He would send back the ordered product through UPS but send an item that cost less in material value and pocket the full refund price from Amazon.
For example, the customer purchased a rare Fender Telecaster electric guitar for $2,600 on Amazon and duped the retailer returning a similar-looking item of lesser value with a Squier Telecaster electric guitar of the same color valued at $400.
Riyaz is facing a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced in March 2022. The valuable lesson from this case is that crime doesn’t pay especially when trying to defraud the biggest e-commerce retailer in the world worth over $1.6 trillion.