Two city employees were arrested Thursday on charges of selling hundreds of new city purchased cellphones online through their own private accounts in similar but separate schemes, the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced.

Eric Luna, the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development's wireless coordinator, and Igor Goldshteyn, an information technology administrator for the city's fire department, are charged with theft of government funds and wire fraud.

“As alleged, Eric Luna and Igor Goldshteyn, New York City employees, betrayed the trust placed in them and abused their powers to make purchases for their respective City agencies,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. “They allegedly sold over the internet hundreds of mobile phones intended for official use, and pocketed the proceeds of those illegal sales. Now, thanks to DOI investigators, Luna and Goldshteyn are charged with serious crimes.”

Both schemes followed the same pattern, according to prosecutors. As their respective point person for purchasing wireless equipment for their agencies, the defendants were able to buy cell phones on the city's tab that were supposed to be used by city officials.

Instead, according to prosecutors, both defendants absconded with the phones and began selling them online for personal profit. In Luna's case, 84 devices purchased for city use were sold trough a third-party vendor to a Florida company that paid Luna in excess of $43,000 for them.

Goldshteyn operated three different eBay account names through which prosecutors say they identified 36 devices owned by the city sold for more than $10,000. Prosecutors noted that between December 2015 to around May 2016, the PayPal account associated with Goldshteyn's eBay accounts saw approximately $40,000 transfered to Goldshteyn's personal checking account.

The scheme appeared to be discovered after an oversight agency responsible for tracking the city's telecommunication system was alerted in April 2017 by Verizon, the vendor supplying the phones Luna and Goldshteyn allegedly sold, that a number of devices purchased for use by city officials were being activated by noncity employees.

Luna and Goldshteyn appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox on Thursday, the U.S. attorney's office said. No information about counsel for the defendants was available.