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The Courts Crime Hardware

Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts (theverge.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the can't-do-that dept.
A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set.
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Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts More

Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts

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  • At least $275K :)

  • Apparently (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday January 31, 2022 @07:17PM (#62225357)

    Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, ...

    He was their Prime suspect. :-)

  • Is Dicedot going to report every large non-techy warehouse theft?

    The effect on anyone but the perp is nil.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Indeed. This whole article is breathtakingly offtopic for Slashdot.

      In other news: some guy got arrested for stealing shit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dstwins ( 167742 )
        Its techy.. but only tangentially so.. given he stole computer parts..

        • No, it's appeal is that it involves Amazon.

          I'm surprised Amazon didn't notice disparities in package weight/size vs purported content, as well as the surplus in the items the manager actually ordered compared to what should have been there.

          It sounds like he had a great plan, except Amazon tracks everything, making his over/under weight/size packages easy to spot once you look for it.

  • Don't be like Douglas

  • So that's what, 30 current GPUs? He couldn't even start a proper crypto farm with that!

    • ebay man

    • He sold them, it would have been brilliant to squirrel-away CPUs, GPUs, and other bits to build a mining rig and hide it in the facility, never actually removing them from the warehouse...

      Free hardware + free electricity = Big Profits!

  • FedEx (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    FedEx employees might do it as well as far as I'm concerned. My recently purchased laptop was delivered to and signed by a person who doesn't exist. Luckily after a dozen of attempts of disputing this with Walmart they refunded me.

    • The biggest theft I've ever seen from a data center was carried out by the security staff. They got maybe 10 laptops and some server parts they had no chance of ever using before they got caught and fired.

  • 273K (Score:5, Funny)

    by brentashley ( 9329937 ) on Monday January 31, 2022 @08:26PM (#62225553)
    In his defense, $273K is $0C
  • He wouldn't have even gotten arrested if he did this in San Francisco or Manhattan.

  • He is a talented sales man, amazon should employ him! Again.

  • The potential sentence seems excessive. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @02:32AM (#62226177)
    New rule: Prison is only for people who hurt other people. If you can't produce an actual, individual human witness willing to testify that someone harmfully impacted them (not just some abstract rule that indirectly affects them), then prison is not on the table.

    Probation conditions are just fine to enforce property crime laws against corporations. And, imo, that too is debatable.

    Laws derive their legitimacy from protecting people, not defending power constructs made up by rich kids to legitimize their parents' stealing.

    • How about the people whose hardware he stole? That's not very abstract.

      • "How about the people whose hardware he stole? That's not very abstract.

        Absolutely true. And I'm saying the case should be about them, not about the abstract idea of property. But if focusing on his actual victims shows his crimes to be less extreme than what the state would prefer to charge him with, then that's just the way it should go.

        Conversely, in other cases, the truth of victims shows that someone committed a much worse crime than power wants to charge them with.

    • Re:The potential sentence seems excessive. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DrSpock11 ( 993950 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @08:14AM (#62226603)

      The hardware he stole reduces supply and drives up prices and reduces availability for everyone else. During a time when there's already a global shortage of computer parts and runaway inflation in general. Just because he didn't murder someone doesn't make it a victimless crime.

      • The hardware he stole reduces supply and drives up prices and reduces availability for everyone else.

        Maybe he sold them to the guy(s) who were gonna buy it anyway. He diverted supply to other customers, hardware was not destroyed. He indirectly stole from all of us through retail/wholesale inventory shrinkage costs but market prices for the hardware stolen were a wash.

      • Have you seen how many product returns Amazon just dumps. Your point about removing it from market in a time of shortage, he didn't remove it from market he was on-selling so the product went back to market. But if your point is that number of product returns that Amazon dumps damages the market then I agree Amazon should go to prison for all the reasons you listed.

      • I'm not saying it was a victimless crime, but the prosecution should be about his actual victims and not the abstract rule of inviolate property. Like if someone lost their job because of him, that person should testify. If someone suffered stress or indignity as a direct consequence of his crimes, that should be part of it. Things like that have to be the crux of the case if justice is the goal rather than mechanistic rule enforcement.

        Just making it an ideological statement about property is authorit

    • || Laws derive their legitimacy from protecting people, not defending power constructs made up by rich kids to legitimize their parents' stealing

      Um, a quick jaunt through the history books would indicate the exact opposite - laws are pretty much ALWAYS aimed at maintaining the interests of the current power structure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      I'd be ok with this rule, IF there was really a comparable incentive to avoid property crime.

      As it stands, prison time is generally "on the table" only because it's viewed as a more powerful deterrent. (If you levy a fine, you may or may not succeed in collecting it. And good criminals may just view those as a "cost of operations". It just motivates them to steal more, to make sure those "fees" are covered.)

      I feel like if you're caught stealing a substantial amount from a company, you should be forced to c

      • Deterrence is not as legitimate as people make it out to be. If it were, wouldn't it be rational to just have death sentences for all crimes? Justice demands that punishments not be disproportionate to crimes, and any sort of imprisonment for a property crime with no appreciable human suffering involved is clearly disproportionate.

        In fact, it should be evaluated whether or not our whole thinking on the subject is based on faulty assumptions. Something is clearly wrong when the law pretends that rippin

        • I agree that studies show prison isn't really working so well as a deterrent. But no, it wouldn't be rational to just have death sentences for all crimes.

          Like you said, it's supposed to be about justice and using appropriate punishments for the crimes committed. Just because a crime involves property, though, doesn't necessarily mean there was "no appreciable suffering" involved. That attitude does a gross injustice to individuals who devoted large chunks of their life to amassing whatever wealth/fortune/fa

    • Not to mention the societal cost of my taxes going to pay for his $40,000 per year cost of incarceration. If he gets 20 years that's easily over $1 million in taxpayer dollars (counting inflation) that could have been spent on something more useful to society. Like repairing that giant pothole in the bike trail that almost makes me crash every morning on my way to work.

    • Maximum sentences are rarely ever given out. Don't be fooled by the news. Note, they didn't specify the MINIMUM sentence...

    • This is idiotic. Criminal punishment (what we're talking about here) has two functions: retribution and restitution. Restitution is fairly obvious. Retribution is about good to society. If I could commit theft and know that the max penalty was simply returning what I stole, then that would INCENTIVIZE crime. It's a known fact that not all criminals are caught and not all prosecutions are successful. Thus from an economic perspective a restitution only system would have a rate of return equal to 1 minu

      • You're putting words in my mouth there. I didn't say "no jail for property crimes." Property crimes quite often have significant emotional consequences to victims, and I'm saying that justice has to be about those consequences rather than about some dry academic principle.

        If that means that crimes against corporations by ordinary people increase, well boo-hoo. Sorry to hear that some conglomerate's stock price will be lower while actual humans are less likely to be victimized by the system.

  • Yeah, I’ve seen more than one $10,000 network switch sitting on the truck dock plates in the “ Fulfillment center” In the last 10 years

  • He should have sold them on Amazon. Not like they pay any attention to who sells things there.

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