Woman jailed after billing Men's Wearhouse with fake invoices for 8 years

[beschizza]

Originally published at: Woman jailed after billing Men's Wearhouse with fake invoices for 8 years | Boing Boing

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[Otherbrother]

@beschizza

Gina Suzanne Lonestar, an office worker at Men’s Wearhouse, formed a fake company and used it to issue invoices to her employer for extremely boring vendor supplies and services.

Ah, embezzlement. The most socially respectable form of felony theft.

Jerry:
George is dating a prisoner.

Cosmo Kramer:
Oh, what’s she in for?

George Costanza:
Embezzlement.

Cosmo Kramer:
Sounds like a nice girl.

Also, great name!

[gracchus]

She’s gonna love how she looks…in orange.

[generic_name]

@beschizza

The casual, blatant, zero-opsec nature of her crimes means she was always going to be caught and never going to stop,

This.

@beschizza

but also suggests that with even the slightest forethought and planning one might get away with anything. I guarantee it.

I don’t know about that part.

Anything with a long enough paper trail and a lot of money will get found out eventually when the term “internal audit” appears in the story. Even if she hadn’t used her own bank account, and gaffed up a completely believable company, someone would double check that the company actually exists when they see a million dollars in billing.

[sdmikev]

I always wonder how people who do things like this think they’ll never get caught.
20 years ago, I worked for a pretty large company here in Southern CA. The person that was in charge of procuring and issuing laptops to employees was pinching off stock and selling them on ebay - “brand new in box”, I assume the ad read.
Anyway, the problem with this, of course is that when HW is purchased, the serial numbers are tracked internally and with the vendor. In this case, the latter was what got him caught.
Someone who bought a laptop called the vendor when he had a problem with it. “Sir, this doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to X company, based on that serial number”. You can imagine where it went from there…

[blackeye]

@beschizza

with even the slightest forethought and planning one might get away with anything.
I guarantee it.

I don’t know whether to go with “Rob, I want in”, or “Rob, we’d like to discuss a few things”.

[gatto]

@beschizza

She was authorized to approve invoices for work done by vendors the whole time she worked for Men’s Wearhouse, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

isn’t there generally a difference between the person who approves invoices and the people who write purchase orders exactly for reasons like this?

sounds like a breakdown in process …

[Kilkrazy]

She got away with it for 8 years, which doesn’t exactly signal a high quality of annual audit.

How many cases are there where someone like her flew to Kerala after 7 years with £1.4 million and the company is too embarrassed to make anything public.

I’m not condoning crime but there is a kind of guilty joy in this sort of white collar heist.

[beschizza]

@generic_name

Anything with a long enough paper trail and a lot of money will get found out eventually when the term “internal audit” appears in the story. Even if she hadn’t used her own bank account, and gaffed up a completely believable company, someone would double check that the company actually exists when they see a million dollars in billing

The way people get away with this scam, specifically, is they have someone actually do the work being billed. A handyman changes the lightbulb billed at $100. The printer ink is actually dropshipped to the office. It means they make less, and it gets noticed sooner, and they might get fired, but it won’t sustain a prosecution.

[gatto]

just don’t buy too many items or have too much work done. it’s a balance…

A former Yale employee admits she stole $40 million in electronics from the...

( although, like you say, she might have done better to inflate the costs of needed machines, rather than buy extra equipment. )