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EVERETT — A now-former PUD employee in its information technology department is said to have stolen more than $100,000 worth of PUD-owned iPhones, iPads and computers from the utility to sell them on eBay.
How? His job involved allocating devices to employees. This included the ability to process and wipe devices when the utility is ready to offload them as surplus. To do the crime, he was stealing the devices, unlocking them using administrative access, and putting them up for resale.
These were Apple iPad Pros, iPhone 13s, iPhone 14s, and more. Lots of them: Some 470 Apple devices and 47 desktop and laptop computers were missing, the PUD accounted.
Everett Police arrested the 36-year-old Marysville man Wednesday, June 4 on charges of embezzlement of public property and for trafficking in stolen goods.
He was arrested in a Petco parking lot on these felony charges. His criminal record until then had been clean as a whistle.
The Tribune is not naming him because he has not been arraigned, where a judge decides the charges are valid.
At the PUD, the first clue came when 129 Apple devices were found missing in an audit.
He was placed on leave in late September a few days after another incident. Security video pinpointed he had arrived afterhours to the PUD Operations Center, near Boeing’s Everett factory, and took iPhones and iPads from coworkers in his own IT department, the police report says.
He filed his resignation in early October. He avoided requests for a meeting with HR, the police report says.
The average salary for the specific job position he worked is $65,270, ZipRecruiter.com says. He had been hired in late 2020.
“The PUD has already taken steps to strengthen internal controls to help prevent a situation like this from occurring in the future,” Kellie Stickney, a PUD spokeswoman, said. The utility does not comment on ongoing police investigations, she said.
The steps the PUD took include hiring a specific person to handle inventory control, and more protocols for when a device is removed from the inventory system, she said.
One key change having a third-party vendor perform the final step of removing the device from the PUD’s inventory, of disconnecting the Apple administrative controls tying the phone to the PUD. The past thievery was able to be done because the IT worker had the ability to disconnect these
administrative tethers himself, making the phones free and clear for resale.
How it unraveled and why many are still missing
Hard evidence emerged because device serial numbers for phones he sold on his eBay store matched the PUD’s asset logs.
The trigger happened this spring after one of the phones considered stolen popped up as active on Verizon’s network, the police report said.
“A search warrant with Verizon provided a lead,” Everett Police spokeswoman Officer Natalie Given said.
Police talked with the stolen phone’s buyer, and dug into the thief’s eBay shop. It helped tie together the case.
The stolen devices are relatively new. The iPhone 13 came out in 2021, for example. The guy sold one of those for $340, for example.
Stickney said a majority of the devices taken were already scheduled for disposition soon. The phones that weren’t were replaced at no-cost through their tech vendor plan, she said.
“We did not have to make unexpected purchases” because of the missing items, Stickney said.
So far, nine phones have been returned to the PUD by their buyers.
“More are expected within the coming weeks,” Given said.
The PUD gets its iPhones through a package plan with its provider, Stickney from the PUD said. “No, we do not purchase these outright,” she said. “We do purchase iPads and they are also on a regular exchange schedule.”
The PUD uses Apple phones because of their security features, Stickney said.
The PUD also immediately reported the loss to the state Auditor’s Office and Everett Police when it learned of the problem, Stickney said.
The police report filed into court last week said as of June 4 approximately 150 of the PUD’s devices are still floating out there. This is because while nine devices could be tracked down by a police detective reaching the people who bought them, the police report says many of his buyers on eBay were third-party resellers looking for inventory to resell. Some had no clear answer as to where these devices they bought last year are today, the police report says.
