A 41-year-old Wilkes-Barre man is charged with selling computational hardware to a Nazareth company but failing to deliver or install it and then stealing other equipment from the company and selling it to someone else, borough police report.
Philip Joseph Dilullo was arraigned Wednesday afternoon on two counts of theft by deception and single counts of theft and receiving stolen property, records show.
He was released on $100,000 unsecured bail pending a preliminary hearing tentatively scheduled 2:30 p.m. July 11 in Central Court in Easton, records show.
In April 2021, Local Mining Ventures LLC agreed to buy 100 graphics cards from Dilullo’s company Zero Test Data LLC that are specific to powering devices that handle cryptocurrency transactions, court papers say.
Local Mining Ventures provides the computing power to those involved in cryptocurrency.
Local Mining Ventures also agreed to pay the company to install the hardware at the business in the 200 block of South Main Street, police said. A total of $55,500 was wired from Local Mining Ventures to Zero Test Data, police said.
Local Mining Ventures also bought numerous graphics cards and graphics processing units — chips often on the cards — between April and November 2021 from another vender and hired Zero Test Data to install and manage the equipment, police said.
Technology on a graphics card can do the many computations that improve output in the mining — the solving of the complex math problems — of cryptocurrency, according to Investopedia.
In January 2022, Local Mining Ventures noticed the output of the devices was “constantly varying” and not “performing at specific levels based on the total number of devices that were to be installed”, police said.
Local Mining Ventures did an inventory and learned the first 100 graphics cards were not installed and 68 of the GPUs — valued at $57,732 — weren’t present either, police said. The company “demanded” the hardware be returned within 24 hours, court papers say. A Local Mining Ventures principal told police that Dilullo told him he didn’t have the 68 GPUs and never bought the initial 100 graphics cards, court papers say.
A business associate contacted the Local Mining Ventures’ principal and said he believed 48 of the 68 devices that were supposed to be on the Local Mining Ventures machines were actually sold to him for his Whitehall Township firm, police said. Local Mining Ventures determined the serial numbers matched, police said.
Nazareth police began to investigate and found the Whitehall company paid Zero Test Data $45,000 for what actually were Local Mining Ventures’ devices and their installation after coming to an agreement in November 2021, court papers say.
When the devices were not delivered and weeks passed, the owner of the Whitehall company was instructed by Dilullo to go to the Local Mining Ventures’ address in Nazareth at which point the 48 GPUs were delivered by Dilullo to the Whitehall business owner, police said.
On May 27, the owner of the Whitehall firm turned over the 48 devices to Nazareth police, court papers say. The serial numbers did in fact match the ones that were supposed to be installed at Local Mining Ventures, police said.
Dilullo’s attorney David Melman declined to comment as did the owner of Local Mining Ventures.
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Tony Rhodin can be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.
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