A Malaysian man has been convicted of conspiring with a logistics manager to pocket more than 25,000 iPhones from a company tasked with repairing the devices, costing the firm $5 million S $6.8 million.
The judge found Ng guilty of both charges Monday, saying she found Ng to be a forthright and credible witness.
Ng had testified in the trial against Lim, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2021.
In addition, both Ng and Lim worked for Pegatron Service Singapore, which repairs iPhones for Apple.
Lim was formerly an assistant operations manager at the company, and committed the offenses between January 2018 and May 2019 after he quit his job.
Ng was responsible for receiving iPhones from Apple and its service providers or retailers, the logistics manager said.
The production team would check the phones and repair them, before the logistics department sent the phones back to Apple service providers or retailers.
Phones that could not be repaired by the production team would be retained by the production team for further checks, or sent to Apple's warehouse vendor Schenker Singapore for scrapping or torn down for parts, or repaired by a different service provider.
In late 2017, Ng began exploiting a loophole in Apple's and Pegatron's processes: She was authorised to manually write off a phone from Apple's Inventory System, but she knew that Apple and Pegatron would not verify if the written-off phone had been delivered to Schenker.
She could say that a phone had been delivered, even if it had not been delivered. Lim found an overseas buyer willing to accept the defective phones, Mr. Lim said in a statement. He would provide Ng with the details of the transaction and communicate with the buyer.
Ng had a subordinate pack of the phones, which were sent to Malaysia.
If she received the phones back in Singapore, Ng would return them to her home in Singapore and she would return the phones to Pegatron without anyone noticing.
Ng's earnings were split between the two, with Lim earning more than S $3.1 million in profit and Ng making between S $2.2 million and S $2.9 million.
Lim spent the money for his personal expenses and legal fees.
In May 2019 Apple conducted a surprise audit and found that there were phones that were unaccounted for.
Pegatron was obligated to pay compensation to Apple of between $150 and $250 per misappropriated phone, which was owed to Apple as compensation.
He is to be sentenced at a later date.