A 27-year-old man who was part of a $1.5 million scheme involving Apple gift cards was sentenced Monday to five years in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Jason Tout-Puissant and conspirator Syed Ali, 29, pleaded guilty in 2019 to wire fraud in connection with the scheme, according to the attorney’s office. Tout-Puissant also has been ordered to pay $1.26 million in restitution to Apple, prosecutors said.
Tout-Puissant admitted that he used stolen point-of-sale devices from a Southlake Apple store in April 2016 to load $50,000 in store credits onto 26 gift cards, according to court documents. He then used a mobile app that generates QR codes for the value of gift cards and sent the codes to Ali, documents stated.
As part of his plea, Ali admitted that he and another suspect used the QR codes to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of Apple products from retail stores in New York, according to a news release issued by the attorney’s office on Monday.
The operation, which ran from October 2015 until at least January 2017, involved more than $1.5 million in illegally obtained Apple store gift cards around the U.S., according to court documents.
“If these defendants thought their million-dollar fraud would go unnoticed simply because they targeted a trillion-dollar company, they were sorely mistaken,” U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham said in a prepared statement.
Ali was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison last October and reported to a federal institution in Pennsylvania several weeks ago to serve his sentence, said Jay Ethington, his lawyer. Brady Wyatt III, who represented Tout-Puissant, declined to comment.
U.S. District Judge David Godbey presided over sentencing for both men.
The FBI’s Dallas field office investigated the case, and a New York field office helped with Ali’s arrest. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sid Mody prosecuted the case.
