DoorDash driver pleads guilty for operating $2.5M online delivery scam

A former DoorDash driver pleaded guilty on Tuesday for operating an online delivery scheme that manipulated the platform's software and bilked the company out of millions of dollars.

According to the US Attorney's Office of the Northern District of California, 30-year-old Sayee Chaitanya Reddy Devagiri was just one of a gang of co-conspirators involved in the “elaborate scheme” to bilk the company of millions.

Federal prosecutors say the Devagiri, a DoorDash driver at the time, used another employee’s credentials to gain access to the delivery platform and manipulated the company’s software to pay for deliveries that never took place.

Devagiri worked with four other defendants to cary out the scam, which ran from 2000 through 2021, before being busted by the FBI.

Labeled a “a modern Bay Area crime story” by officials, in total the group raked in more than $2.5 million in fraudulent payments from the San Francisco based company.

In a modern Bay Area crime story, we alleged that a gang of DoorDash drivers stole $2.5m from the co. by using their access to employee creds to create a bunch of high-value fake orders.

Yesterday, one of those drivers pleaded guilty.

More: https://t.co/mlykePp24u pic.twitter.com/BVlLsZSI9G

undefined U.S. Attorney NorCal (@USAO_NDCA) May 14, 2025

Gang of DoorDash drivers

To carry out the scam, Devagiri would first create fake customer DoorDash accounts to place high-cost orders.

Once the orders were in the system, Devagiri would manually reassign them to fraudulent DoorDash driver accounts, also created and controlled by the group.

Devagiri then “caused the fraudulent driver accounts to report that the orders had been delivered, when they had not,” officials said.

Continuing to manipulate DoorDash’s computer systems, Devagiri would “prompt DoorDash to pay the fraudulent driver accounts for the non-existent deliveries,” and the group would pocket the money.

Not over yet, Devagiri would then go back into the DoorDash system and manually change the status of the scam orders from “delivered” back to “in-process” and then start the entire process of reassigning the orders to fake driver accounts, all over again.

“This procedure usually took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” the courts said said.

Devagiri pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, prosecutors said

According to the DoJ, Devagiri is the third defendant to be convicted for his role in this conspiracy. Co-defendant 29-year-old Manaswi Mandadapu, also from Newport, pleaded guilty to similar charges on May 6th.

Both men now face up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Devagiri will be back in court for a preliminary hearing in September before sentencing.

All four suspects were indicted last October. Additionally, the employee who gave the DoorDash gang their credentials, California resident Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, was convicted after pleading guilty in November 2023.