The fact that there seems to have been no compensation is evidence to me that this was an intentional scam by the employee and they're doing what they can not to call attention to it. In my experience Apple is extremely generous with compensating for errors like this. For example, when I sent my MBP 2016 in for a keyboard repair, they decided to take that opportunity to upgrade the SSD from 256GB to 1TB. This is just one example of many. I used to do technical support for Apple in the beginning of my tech career and they gave us a huge budget to throw money at people.