Chambliss met Chinasa in 2004 through his side business. Chinasa told Chambliss that he lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and ran a business called DataNet Communications. When Chambliss began working for Packet 360, Chinasa asked Chambliss to help him by using warranties purchased for Packet 360 clients to replace malfunctioning Cisco products. Chambliss agreed, using a warranty contract held by Medicorps Health, even though Chinasa had no right to make claims under Medicorps’s warranty. Chinasa also eventually purchased his own warranty to use for some returns. 

For four years, Chinasa and Chambliss initiated hundreds of service requests with Cisco, causing Cisco to ship parts worth millions of dollars. These requests shared many common characteristics. First, each contained a specifi c complaint that the referenced part was either not responding or not powering up and that other parts worked on the same chassis. Chambliss had told Chinasa that use of such wording would cause Cisco to send a replacement part instead of trying to resolve the problem through online troubleshooting. Use of that verbiage was important to the scheme because normally only 20–30 percent of service requests Cisco received resulted in shipment of a replacement part. 

Chinasa and Chambliss had the parts delivered to different addresses to avoid detection. Chinasa instructed Chambliss to have the parts shipped to Chambliss’s house, to Chinasa, and to Chambliss’s friends located in Richmond, Virginia. Chinasa (and others) periodically travelled from Gaithersburg to Chambliss’s house to pick up the parts Cisco had sent and to drop off the parts Chambliss was to send to Cisco. 

In fall 2009, Cisco became aware of the scheme and started tracking its service requests and intercepting parts Chambliss returned. Initial inspections of intercepted parts revealed that the returned parts in fact were not genuine Cisco products. Indeed, none of the intercepted parts were found to be genuine Cisco products. What crime do you think these two were convicted of? Explain how the facts illustrate the elements of that crime.