A Pakistani man was sentenced to serve 12 years in prison for reportedly unlocking over 1.9 million AT&T phones. The crime caused the company to lose over $200 million.
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The scheme started in 2012 when Muhammed Fahd, 35, enlisted an AT&T employee who worked for a call center in Bothell, Washington via Facebook and convinced them to let him use his credentials to unlock the cellphones. According to ABC News, the scam allowed Fahd to erase the phones from AT&T’s network since he was unlocking them from his home in Pakistan. He continued on with the crime despite two employees being terminated from the company after they found out about the bribery.
Fahd sold the phones through third-party services and made millions of dollars and he paid three AT&T employees $992,000 between 2012 and 2017 before his 2018 arrest in Hong Kong.
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He later pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy after being extradited to the United States and was sentenced on Thursday. He apologized for his actions in a letter to U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik but the government did not recover any assets from the case. Along with his sentence, Fahd was also ordered to pay $200 million in restitution.
“Over time, I became obsessed with the money, and any thought that I was doing wrong disappeared. I did not know it, but I was on a path to self-destruction. Worse yet my misconduct destroyed the lives of those around me.”