Apple Sues Recycling Company for Reselling iPhones, iPads and Watches – IT Pro – News

Apple is suing recycling company GEEP Canada. That company had been hired by Apple to dismantle and recycle devices, but the company is said to have resold more than 100,000 devices by agreement.

Between January 2015 and December 2017, Apple sent a total of 531,966 iPhones to GEEP for recycling. Also, 25,673 iPads and 19,277 Apple Watches were shipped to the recycling company. When Apple checked the company’s warehouse, the manufacturer found that some of its devices were stored separately. This gave rise to the suspicion that these were not recycled. AppleInsider writes about the case, on the basis of documents that at The Logic appeared.

Next, Apple checked the serial numbers of devices sent to the recycling company to see if they were active. According to Apple, it turned out that 103,845 devices were activated and were active on an LTE network. According to Apple, this probably concerns many more devices, because only hardware with an active LTE connection has been discovered.

Apple is suing GEEP for theft of the devices, because it was agreed that the supplied hardware would be destroyed and recycled. The recycling company does not deny the theft, but says it was done without permission by three employees. Apple claims those employees were in the company’s management.

In the lawsuit, Apple is claiming the revenue that GEEP brought in from reselling the devices. In addition, Apple wants to see 31 million Canadian dollars. Converted that is about 20 million euros.

The lawsuit recently went public, but was already filed by Apple in January this year. GEEP’s defense followed in July. The alleged theft of the devices took place in late 2017 or early 2018, according to Apple. The collaboration with the recycling company has already ended since then. GEEP Canada no longer exists in that capacity. The company has been merged into Quantum Lifecycle Partners.