School employee stole 3,000 Apple iPods earmarked for Native American kids
She ran a program that used iPods to teach reading and math to underprivileged Native American schoolkids living on tribal land. Now, 46-year-old Kristy Stock of New Mexico is getting 18 months in prison for stealing 3,000 of them, which she resold for a personal gain of over $800,000 between 2013 and 2018.
That’s according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland (via Engadget), and Stock isn’t the first who’s been sentenced as part of this scheme — it all seems to center around around 36-year-old Colorado resident Saurabh Chawla, who bought up stolen electronics and other goods and resold them on eBay and Amazon. Law enforcement raided him in 2019, according to an earlier press release, and he bought stolen iPads from another New Mexico school district as well.
Perhaps even more significantly, Chawla worked with a FedEx distribution center manager from Delaware named Joseph Kukta to steal packages before they made it to customers like Walmart, with Chawla paying him $1.5 million according to court documents. Those thefts included shipments of Nike sneakers and devices from Apple, Epson, Kenwood, and Magellan, among other merchandise.
