How a DoorDash driver scammed the company out of $2.5 million

A former DoorDash delivery driver pleaded guilty this week to a wire fraud conspiracy that scammed the company out of over $2.5 million, the US Attorney’s Office in California’s Northern District announced on Tuesday. He and others made it happen over a period of months using fake customer accounts, deliveries that never happened, driver accounts, and access to DoorDash employee credentials.

Here’s how the Attorney’s office describes the scheme. The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDash’s system to pay the driver accounts. Then he’d switch those same orders back to “in process” and do it all over again. Doing this “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” writes the US Attorney’s Office.

Devagiri faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and is scheduled for a status hearing in September. He and four others were charged in August for their roles in the scheme, which prosecutors say was carried out between November 2020 and February 2021. The DoorDash employee whose insider credentials they used, Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, was charged separately in 2022 and pleaded guilty the following year, the Attorney’s Office wrote in October.