A Silicon Valley tech exec has copped to a high-end heist of hardware. Andrew Halvorsen, of Livermore, California, admitted in federal court Monday that he masterminded a scheme to swipe and sell MacBooks worth more than half a million dollars from his employer, a cloud-based machine data analytics company located in Redwood City, SFGate reported.
Halvorsen, the Senior Director of Information Technology, used his clout within the company to order the laptops and then doled them out for dough. The 49-year-old betrayed the trust of the company between November 2019 and May 2023 by nicking at least 141 Apple computers, the plea agreement detailed. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, the stolen tech tallied a whopping $535,000 in losses for the firm.
The dodgy dealings went down in daring daylight exchanges, often in parking lots, where Halvorsen rendezvoused with his illicit middleman. The co-conspirator would then offload the goods out-of-state, as per the admission in court documents. These two thieves spoke in codes over texts—phrases like "2 16/64" to describe the pilfered tech specs, sizes, and quantities, according to SFGate.
Halvorsen, who faces up to five years in the slammer and could be slapped with a $250,000 fine, will learn his fate on April 15. Scrutiny of his past reveals a twist: before his descent into digital delinquency, Halvorsen polished his Apple expertise as a retail worker for the very brand he plundered, as reflected in a legacy LinkedIn profile snapshot from Wayback Machine from 2008, noted by SFGate.
The case unraveled after a tag-team investigation by the IRS Criminal Investigation and the FBI, culminating in his guilty plea.
