As many as 185 Indian employees at Apple’s California headquarters have been fired for taking part in a massive charity scam.
The workers at the tech giant’s Cupertino office were terminated for exploiting Apple’s Matching Grants program, which matches employee donations to charitable organisations, by colluding with an Indian community group or groups to have their contributions secretly funnelled back to them.
Last month six Chinese workers were arrested and charged for abusing the program in the same way. The former employees allegedly pretended to make $152,000 in donations to the American Chinese International Cultural Exchange (ACICE) or Hop4Kids, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said.
The workers’ donations were then returned to them, and one of them, Siu Kei (Alex) Kwan, 37, the CEO of Hop4Kids and accountant for ACICE, kept Apple’s matching funds. They have also been charged with defrauding the state of California by allegedly writing off their fake charitable donations on their tax returns.
Between 50 and 185 Telegu-speaking Indian workers, from senior management to entry-level executives, were let go after Apple’s finance department noticed irregularities and made a report to the IRS, which detected the fraud, Indian media outlet Great Andhra reported.
As a result a US-based organisation for Telegu Indians is under investigation by the FBI, the IRS, and the US Department of Justice, according to the Economic Times.
The Indian scam scandal comes amid an ongoing debate over H-1B foreign work visas in the United States, with X boss Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy defending the program, while other supporters of president-elect Donald Trump want it scrapped.
About 75% of H-1B petitioners are Indians, by far the largest group, followed by Chinese on 12%.
After a series of heated exchanges with X users late last month, Musk started banning right-wing critics who opposed his plan to radically expand Indian immigration, calling them “contemptible fools” who “must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem”.
Musk has since moved on from the issue to focus on attacking the UK government for failing to stop Pakistani child rape gangs from abusing tens or even hundreds of thousands of White British girls in recent decades.
Header image: Apple Park in Cupertino (Daniel L. Lu (user:dllu) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link)
