A delivery boy working for Flipkart allegedly replaced 12 iPhone handsets with fake ones, and duped the company of Rs 500,000 in the process. According to the report, 21-year old B Naveen ordered a dozen Apple smartphones from fake addresses in Washermenpet. The last mentioned is the area in which he was assigned to deliver Flipkart’s goods.
Naveen would pretend to deliver the iPhone devices to the fictional customers and then ‘impersonating’ them, he would return the phones citing user dissatisfaction with the products. The handsets that were returned by him in place of the original Apple iPhones were supposedly cheap Chinese knockoffs bought from Ritchie street, Chennai’s electronics shopping hub.
The accused would probably have got away with it if he hadn’t been too greedy. The Flipkart employee in charge of the warehouse became suspicious upon noticing the unusual pattern of a high number of product returns from a single area. A complaint against Naveen was raised at the Madhavaram police station. He was then arrested and produced before a magistrate.
Also see: Flipkart delivers soap to customer instead of Samsung phone
The New Indian Express reports that the accused is a first time offender who attempted to dupe Flipkart on the advise of an advocate. He apparently did this to settle his debts. The police were able to recover all 12 iPhone which are collectively worth about Rs 5 lakhs. This is not the first time people have tried to get one over the ecommerce company.
Only in March this year, a Punjab-based gang was arrested for cheating Flipkart of lakhs of rupees. According to TOI, the accused would order expensive electronics, replace their internal components with poor quality parts, return the products and then ask for refunds on them.