Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/15/the-psychology-of-super-embezzlers-brilliant-thieves-who-enjoy-outsmarting-those-around-them.html
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… and then just keep going anyway if you do 
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This is true of the embezzlers I’ve met, one in particular. She was a bookkeeper, hard-working and reliable, very friendly and positive, married with small kids. After her crimes were discovered by the accountant, it turned out she had embezzled from two different companies before and had been barred from working in any financial capacity. I have no doubt she’s still doing the same thing to this day.
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Google “Christopher Pettit” and you’ll find a story about one of the largest embezzlers/fraudsters in recent years that has received almost no national news coverage. He defrauded his clients in such a brazen way that it defies reason and logic.
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Same experience.
The one true embezzler I’ve met was also an office bookkeeper. She worked in a large medical office for many years (maybe 15 or 20?) and was extremely trusted and liked by everyone. Not only did she keep the books, handle all the employee benefits, etc., but she was also the one in the office who would gather cash from everyone for birthday celebrations, baby showers, etc. She only got caught because she grew so over-confident (and was probably such a pathological thief) that she was also regularly taking cash out of a doctor’s handbag.
That doctor would usually leave her purse in the bookkeeper’s office while seeing patients, because the bookkeeper was trusted and always there. The doctor was the type of person who didn’t pay close attention to money, but after years of having a vague sense that she was withdrawing more cash than she was actually spending, one day she noticed for sure that cash was missing at the end of a workday. She and her medical partners arranged to have a hidden camera installed in the bookkeeper’s office and the very next day they got video of the bookkeeper rifling through the doctor’s purse just a minute after she dropped it off. They were all flabbergasted. That sparked a forensic accounting investigation (since it was the frickin’ bookkeeper!), which revealed she had stolen hundreds of thousands from the business in just the last few years. They didn’t bother going back more than a few years because they knew she’d never pay it all back. And who knows how much she had stolen from those pooled birthday/shower gifts and whatnot over the years. It was really sad.
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