Facing 10 years in prison for selling 1,000 stolen MacBooks

James, 35 years old, buys the MacBook were stolen between October 2015 and June 2020, with prices ranging from $1,600 to $2,250 per device.

According to court documents, the devices James purchased included 100 stolen from Tesla, 100 from UC Berkeley and the remaining 800 from Stanford University. All are leaked by internal employees.

James will be put on trial in July. For the above charge, this person can face up to 10 years in prison and have to remediate the consequences. James has now agreed to pay $2.765 million in damages to Tesla and the locations where the equipment was lost.

Normally, MacBooks used in businesses and organizations will be installed with the MDM (Mobile Device Management) program to administer the system. When a business makes a sales contract with Apple, the MacBook’s serial strip is recorded. Upon activation, the information, the most important of which is the serial number, will be checked and sent to the server for comparison.

If under the management of MDM, the machine requires login to an organization or company account and then automatically downloads and installs the software according to the predefined configuration. Therefore, with this type of device, the user may not be able to edit the settings available in the device.

Recently, MacBook MDM appeared in Vietnam as second-hand goods at a lower selling price. According to an expert, most MDM machines are sourced from US companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook or Tesla with strong configuration. Machines using old Intel chips before 2020 can use a tool to change the serial number, so it almost completely eliminates the MDM message that makes it difficult for users to detect.

Bao Lam (according to Apple Insider)