*smilingjaws: Last I heard he had been arrested for embezzling funds from the Multiple Sclerosis Society where he had been working as a fund raiser. He did jail time. *
Now that pisses me off! I was in 4 bike tours for MS, raising a few thousand. And some schmo embezzled it!
My office hired temps to be the receptionist. One woman seemed very nice, but ended up using us to scam big time.
To start with, she’d talk to her mom in NYC all day (we were in Arlington, VA), putting her on hold to answer business calls. If they wanted to talk to another relative (in NY), she’d conference another call in. So she’d be on two long-distance calls at once. Over three months, she amassed about $2000 in long distance charges. But wait, there’s more!
After about a month (and before the phone bills started coming in), her boyfriend would come in and hang out in the lobby most of the day. (Management didn’t say much if anything.) After she was canned, we started to learn her big grift: her and her boyfriend would go out to merchants and buy stuff on credit. They told whoever that he was an engineer at our company for 5 years. Then when they called to check references, she’d pretend to be the HR director and give him a glowing reference. Or if they needed to talk to him, there he was in his “office”, the reception area couch.
I didn’t find out about this until one evening about a month after she’d gone. I was working late, and I answered the “night bell” with my extension. The caller was asking for someone who was supposedly an engineer at our company. I didn’t recognize the name, but told her that maybe he’d just started. No, she said, he was a 5-year employee with us. Well, I’d been there 8, but I offered that maybe he’d just transferred from our HQ. I went to one of our admin secretaries also working late and explained the call. She asked that I transfer the call, where she explained to the poor merchant that they’d been scammed.
Turns out they’d been getting credit at jewelry stores and the like, so they probably came out with thousands.
Of course, we billed the temp agency for her LD calls. They in turn docked her pending paychecks, then fired her. (I guess she was still working for them. She probably gave some BS story about why she didn’t want to work for us anymore.)
At my company in 1990, a gal who worked in the Corporate Payables department started writing herself checks.
That is, she was one of the invoice/voucher entry clerks, and she also had security to update our files of authorized payees.
She set herself up as a bogus payee.
She then wrote herself a check for a couple grand (that is, entered a voucher for payment to herself).
She waited a couple of weeks, then entered another one.
She waited a couple more weeks, then entered three more within a week or so of each other.
Well, as you folks in Corporate America know, typically when a check is written, it is charged to someone’s department–whichever one is incurring the expense.
Well, someone finally noticed, and started asking some questions.
It didn’t take long to see where the trail led.
The total damage: right at $35,000!
And here’s the kicker–she could have gotten away with it if she had been a little brighter:
This was shortly after Hurricane Hugo whomped SC in 1989. Our company (an electric/natural gas utility) was spending money left and right buying supplies to rebuild our service area.
Had she chosen one of the departments being charged with procuring supplies, where tons and tons of money were being spent already–she might have gotten away with it.
Rogue Trader is a new video out. You should see that one. Its a true story about an employee in 90’s who was able to take $800M from the bank he worked for.
A few come to mind.
In the early '80’s I worked for an oil company where we had a drilling supervisor who created a dummy equipment rental company. He billed us for minor items, like a non-existant generator or some such, at something like $50-100/day, at a drill site. He approved all the drilling invoices and the amounts involved were negligible when considered against the cost of a well. But when you consider we usually had 12 to 30 rigs working,…he was doing OK. I don’t remember how he got nailed, but, incredibly, he was allowed to resign and that was it.
A friend of mine has a heavy equipment leasing company and had a bookkeeper who did pretty much the same thing - created a dummy company and kept paying minor invoices (I think it was supposed to be a parts supplier). She reconciled the bank statements and got along just fine…until she quit. She timed her resignation to allow her to get and reconcile the final statement, but it got delayed in the mail. I don’t know if she would’ve walked otherwise, but she drew some attention to herself the weekend following her final Friday by attempting to trade some physical favors with the guys in the yard for access to the office. IIRC, the take was ~$40K and she got probation.
My brother has a jewelry manufacturing plant and he hired an office manager who almost put him out of business. Now, my brother is an open minded sort and really didn’t mind that Dennis was fond of capri pants and high heels, but the prior embezzlement conviction should’ve been a clue. Anyway, the guy paid to himself all of the payments that were going on the books as payroll tax deposits for almost two years. He also just round filed the delinquency notices and the like that were coming from the IRS. My brother didn’t know until the IRS showed up to take possession of the plant. I do think my brother could have been a little more diligent, but that’s no excuse for the mofo Dennis. Anyway, total damage was $30,000, brother worked out a deal with the IRS and is doing OK, and the creep is in prison, where I’m sure his proclivities in the apparel department are appreciated.
I did know some guys who got Xmas season jobs in the shipping department at a Hickory Farms (specialty deli) who shipped themselves quite a few gift baskets. They told me you’d never get caught doing baskets, because they were made up from a bunch of different small items at the time of packing and it was easy enough to shy the legit baskets enough pieces to make a “personal” one a couple of times a day; stay away from the hams, though.
Geez, if I keep thinkiing about this, I won’t do anything else today. I drove a taxi in Austin for a few years. There was one guy who had a favorite scam. There was a popular cantina on the south side that was good to work at closing time, because most of the patrons were going to the east side (good fare @ 2:30 AM). To get there one could take a route that crossed the Town Lake dam. There were almost always a few people fishing off the dam. If this particular hack judged his passenger(s) to be: a.) illegals and b.) drunk enough, he’d tell them, “Oh man, Immigration’s on the bridge, for $20 I can get you across!” He wasn’t a real popular driver.
One more, not really on topic, but the receptionist mention above reminded me of a receptionist at the oil company. The police showed up with a warrant for her arrest one day. She saw them get off the elevator and hid her name plaque; when they asked for her she told them, “She’s no longer with us!” Walked for that day, anyway.
Shortly after I left Red Roof Inns to work for a another hotel chain, the widow of the company’s founder wanted to sell the chain - all 200 Inns. The CEO decided to make the portfolio look more profitable, he would cut overhead, i.e. - Assistant Managers. All of the General Managers had the option to keep their assistants or take a small pay raise and run the inns themselves. Guess what they all chose? This meant that the inns would have only one person “inn-charge”. When you terminate 200 employees and the costs associated with their benefits, suddenly your bottom line looks a whole lot better.
During my time with RRI, I caught & fired a few desk clerks who would quote one rate (higher) and ring up another rate (lower) and pocket the difference, voiding the room sale when a guest checked out early & make the excuse that another guest wanted to change rooms or just not post the room sale at all. When the assistants were terminated, RRI lost their checks & balances and soon the GMs were doing exactly what I fired those clerks for. ALL of the GMs in my old region were fired after suddenly the occupancy rates were falling, the avg. daily rates were dropping as were the bank deposits.
Before they sold RRI the first time, it was a great chain in which to work and as a place to stay. I stayed at a RRI last weekend and I was not impressed. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”
E A Poe
I’ll give you the call letters and company name because the ownership has changed several times and the company I name was dissolved several years ago.
The radio station: WCOS AM/FM, Columbia, SC.
The accounting person was a white haired little old lady who remembered your birthday and was a delight.
Until the station was sold to U.S. Radio, L.P. and got the first real audit it had had in years. The old girl had been making off with a potload of money.
And looking back, everything you’re told to look out for was being overlooked: She drove a big luxury car that a person in her position shouldn’t be able to afford, she dressed in really good clothes (the name Dalton comes to mind) that ditto…she shouldn’t have been able to afford, every now and then you’d learn about some new furniture at her house that you don’t find cheap (Thomasville comes to mind)…
Now, the drum roll…
This accountant never took a vacation!
(Can’t risk someone else prying in the books)
Good work Yarster, thank you for your cooperation.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to be speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.
J/K 
“Teaching without words and work without doing are understood by very few.”
-Tao Te Ching
I worked for a small roofing company, part-time. The owner was an outlaw biker (and president of the bike club, to boot), but his business was legit. Anyway, when I left, he asked if I had any friends that would be interested in the job, as he didn’t want a completely unknown person around the office (drugs, guns, etc.) and didn’t want someone who would object to these side activities. He ended up hiring a friend of mine. Now, the stupidity of this friend is beyond comprehension. She knew he didn’t know much in the way of running the money end of the business, so she skimmed between $5,000 and $8,000 off of him. However, his bookkeeper and tax man was his uncle, and he informed him of her activities. He threatened to kill her and her family if she didn’t replace the money immediately. She ended up having to go to her parents for the money, went into rehab, and moved out of state to get away from him. Not too bright, stealing from the president of an outlaw biker club. Sheesh! In the end, no one was hurt.
This isn’t the most ingenious scam, but it has to be the lowest: I work for a mortuary transport company picking up bodies. We had an employee who stole a credit card from a residence call and used it to run up a bill of several thousand dollars at Radio Shack, the record store, a sex shop and god knows where else, signing the dead man’s name to the receipts. It’s bad enough to steal from a dead man and sticking a greiving family with the bill, but we always send two drivers to a residence call, so suspicion was cast on both drivers. I can’t tell you how lucky he was that he didn’t pull that crap on me.
Anyway, he got caught when the cops looked at surveillance video from some of the stores where purchases were made. Don’t these idiots know that you can’t leave your house without some camera pointing at you?
About two years later another driver did the same thing. The EXACT same thing.
Is it perhaps ironic that I’m reading this thread while at work?
I was just told the story of a guy who used to work for my pest-control branch. S.O.P. is that a client signs a one-year contract for monthly pest control. The annual amount on such things us usually in the neighborhood of 500 bucks or so, figuring in an initial charge of about $150 with a monthly service charge of about $35 or so.
This guy was going out to do initial services, telling the homeowner he’d do a one-time service for $60 cash, then doing a treatment and coming back to the office and saying, “They changed their mind. They don’t want the contract.”
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
I once worked for a well-known department store. The security people used to tell us stories about all the theft that went on. People that worked in stock used to take items in boxes, pretending they were empty, and chuck them in the dumpster to retrieved later. One dope deflated a basketball and tried to smuggle it out under his shirt. The cashiers weren’t even that sophisticated. One girl just took money right out of the drawer. They later caught the head of sercurity stealing from the jewelery counter. He was caught by his own people. The stupid bastard got fired and then arrested.
~Kyla
“You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.”
I was the receiving manager in a Kmart some years ago and transferred this great kid into my department, at his request, from the garden department. He was one of these wiry, good looking, easy going 19 year olds who made friends with everyone, steamed up all of the girls, worked had and kept people laughing. Receiving is a great place to steal from, with masses of freight packed around in every possible cranny because those stores hate to waste space to store freight in. I had gotten into the habit of checking around the dock area now and then when working outside around the stacks of wooden freight pallets, dumpsters and stacks of bailed cardboard. More than once I’d caught suspicious people lurking back there and had run them off.
One day, I spotted something wedged in the pallets and hopped off of my forklift to check it out and discovered it to be a rather large, very new, expensive boom box. I left it where it was and returned to receiving, where I said nothing to any of my staff and went into security. The security chief and I discussed the matter and he went out a side entrance, checked it out without being seen and came back in to me.
We figured that it was an employee and he told me to behave normally and say nothing to anyone, so I did. An hour later, we closed up shop, sealed the main doors, set the alarms and the head of security went up through an access port on the roof, over to the side of the building and kept watch on the stacks. As I left, I noticed that the young guy I had hired in was still there, BSing with one of the counter girls, and I thought nothing about it and left.
When I came back on duty the next day, security stopped me and told me that they had caught the thief. It had been that cool guy I had hired! He had waited around in the store, chatting and BSing for about 30 minutes after I had left, which, for him, was not unusual, then he had left, gotten into his car and had driven it around the building, hopped out and grabbed the boom box out of the stacks.
They stopped him before he got off of the lot and found out that he had other small things he had been stealing from receiving in his car! He was forced to return everything and fired on the spot! The store had decided not to press charges because he was an employee and they did not want the bad press, but Kmart has a history of prosecuting every shoplifter they catch.
Once, when racks of cigarettes had been unloaded and stacked on carts on the outside dock, I left them there as I made room inside for them and came back out to see this Black guy standing by the rack, eyes as big as saucers, a box of cartons under each arm. He took off running, and dropped the boxes as I yelled at him and spotted a car waiting at the corner of the building, behind the pallet stacks. I jumped the guardrail, ripped a 2x4 off of a pallet and chased him down the road, swinging the club, ready to deck him. His buddy, seeing me waving that 2x4, screaming and swearing for him to stop, took off in the car and left the other one behind. He charged around the corner and by the time I got there, he had caught the car, which was still moving, and hopped in. They took off and I just missed their bumper when I threw the 2x4 at them.
The cigarettes were recovered and from then on in were brought inside immediately.
I used to work at a video arcade a few years back and I must say that absolutely everyone who worked there, including the managers, stole from the store in one way or another. We lowly employees, too fearful of embezzling the $250 cash we were REQUIRED(!) to carry on our person at all times because we were told that we were accountable for every penny. However, this was one of those arcades with ski-ball and other ticket-dispensing machines. Therefore, we had a big goodies counter. Sure, the candy we just stole. But the big-name items, we had to account for and we weren’t allowed to play ticket games for free. So, we all developed a system… all of the coin-catchers on the video games were two or three inches below the place where the token goes in. Because of that, there’s two or three inches of empty space for the token to go through and miss the little slot in the token storage lock-box. We would just unlock the machines and take these tokens for use in the ticket machines and no one ever noticed, even though the tokens were counted (I’ll never understand why since they were tokens, not quarters, and the money was already spent). We actually had a contest to see who could get the most valuable of ticket items: the 4-foot Coca-Cola Polar Bear at 12,000 tickets. Being the jerk who had to work every day over the Christmas season, I won.
Later on, after I left, I found out that the managers had been stealing too… but they actually had keys to the money-token exchange machines and could get away with REAL money.
Two stories I have to relate; one involves a Seattle city employee whose job it was to empty parking meters. This person had not missed a day in several years. One day, this person called in sick, and it was discovered that the employee had been keeping a good percentage of the collections from the parking meter…somewhere in the neighborhood of hundreds of dollars a day.
The second one was related to me by my buddy who used to manage a goldsmithing shop. He told me that his employees used to put ‘greasy kid stuff’ in their hair, and as they worked, they would run their hands through their hair, causing for quite a bit of gold dust to be trapped in the goo. I don’t remember how he caught them, but he soon implemented hairnets!
-dd
From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee-
This is a pretty old thread, but I wanted to give it a little
(((bump)))
because I enjoyed it (at the time - and now after having re-read it!).
Any more stories out there?
Not exactly. Nick Leeson bankrupted Barings with bogus arbitrage trades. He didn’t get 800 mio and he did go to jail.
A few years ago, we found that the pastor from our church-who was on his deathbed dying of leukemia-had embezzeled over a million dollars from our parish and the the last one he had worked at.
He was stealing from the collection plate, the poor box, church accounts, everything. Then he and his secretary (who may or may not have been his mistress-we don’t know and quite frankly, at this point I really don’t care), blamed it on a parish office worker-who was dying of brain cancer at the time. :rolleyes:
He confessed just before he fell into a coma, and now his ex-secretary blames our entire church. The Bishop came to our church that weekend, we had reporters crawling all over the place…
sigh
So while our church never had any problems with pedophile priests (at least, as far as I know), we have had embezzeling priests.
Go figure.