A former DoorDash driver and three others have been charged with participating in a fraudulent delivery scheme that amassed $2.59 million in payouts from DoorDash. Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri from California was leading the scam, along with Manaswi Mandadapu, Matheus Duarte, and Hari Vamsi Anne.
The scam took place while Devagiri was working as a delivery driver for DoorDash between 2020 and 2021. According to the indictment, the group created multiple fake customer and driver accounts. The customer accounts were used to place expensive orders throughout Northern California. They then used login credentials belonging to two DoorDash employees to access the company’s internal systems and change the assigned delivery driver to one of the fake accounts made by the group. The fake account would then falsely mark the orders as delivered, triggering appropriate payments from an external vendor working for DoorDash.
Using the same credentials, the group would reset the order status from delivered to in process and reassign them to other fake driver accounts. The process took less than five minutes per order and was repeated several hundred times, leading to the massive payout.
The abused credentials belong to two DoorDash employees, including Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn. Bottenhorn is a Solano County, California resident, and worked at DoorDash from November 2020 to December 2020. The second employee hasn’t been named yet, but was hired by DoorDash in February 2021.
It’s unclear how the group gained access to the abused credentials. However, given that neither DoorDash employee is named in the indictment, a social engineering or phishing attack may have been used to steal the credentials.
Devagiri is the third defendant to plead guilty in the case. He’s scheduled to appear in court on September 16, 2025, and could face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Bottenhorn was also previously charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud in 2022 and pleaded guilty in November 2023.
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