According to court documents filed Wednesday, Nicholas Woodhams of Kalamazoo, Mich., squeezed 9,075 iPod Shuffles out of Apple by entering real serial numbers on a company site that provides users with when theirs fail under warranty. He then turned the purloined iPods into cash by selling thousands of them for $49 each.

Woodhams ran an iPod repair business under the names iPod Mechanic, iMechanic and Pod Tradeup, operating Web sites under the first pair of names, the two-count complaint read. As of Friday, those sites were offline.

"Through trial and error, the defendant determined that he could guess valid, warranted serial numbers, and enter then into Apple's Web site for 'replacement' units without ever in fact purchasing or processing the 'original' units," the prosecutors said.

"On an almost daily basis during the course of the scheme, the defendant compiled lists of manufactured or 'guessed' Shuffle serial numbers that would be accepted by Apple's Web site, and dispatched them to part-time employees by hand or e-mail," they added.

The government alleged that Woodhams ran the scam between March 2006 and October 2007, and sent more than 5,000 packages containing the stolen Apple hardware using the U.S. Postal Service.