Ambition, risk-training, vanity, lack of morals…
Why isn't she the CEO?
Now-former HP finance manager Shelbee Szeto has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to forfeit more than 250 luxury items after she blew $5m on herself using company credit cards. The list of stuff [PDF] she fraudulently bagged includes a 2020 Tesla sedan, a 2021 Porsche sport utility vehicle, 46 Chanel …
She's clearly a rank amateur. How did she think she would ever get away with this? The Gucci bags and Rolex watches sound like some incompetents way of hiding the money and keeping it from flowing through her own bank accounts. The cars were a bit obvious too.
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I guess so, as why else would you buy 16 of the things? There's no logical reason why, even if you liked them and wanted some backups, you'd need anywhere near that many. It's not hard to imagine that someone buying that shopping list might not be thinking very clearly, although that's not going to change the consequences of their actions.
Unlike luxury cars, Rolexes and other luxury mechanical watches keep their value very well, are relatively easy to hide and transport, and can readily be exchanged for cash without any registration needed. They are rare enough to be valuable but common enough to make an individual one close to untraceable unless the serial number is known. Some of them can also be extremely inconspicuous - someone could walk through customs with 50+ grand strapped onto their wrist without anyone blinking an eyelid.
As such, besides being a vanity object and of interest to collectors, they are eminently suited for small-scale money laundering, bribing of officials etc
I guess the same might also hold true for designer handbags, but I have no clue if that is really the case.
There are a few we know of who didn't do something stupid, well not stupid enough that it resulted in their capture. Those people are probably still enjoying their luxurious lifestyle on someone else's money, though, and one part of that is avoiding having us know where they are. The whole fake identity thing probably gets boring after a while, but there are people who do it successfully.
"the phony Stripe and Square merchant accounts were linked to Szeto's personal bank account — that the fraudulent funds were legitimate business transactions.
Finally, Szeto also failed to report the income to the Internal Revenue Service when she filed her tax returns. Oops."
Second one is a big red flag - isn't it common knowledge that it was the IRS that got Al Capone? As to the first, she probably could have set up a company, opened bank accounts for the company, and at least have the paperwork above board. Either way it looks like HP didn't have good controls in place to identify this - most companies where I've ever had anything to do with procurement had at least 4-eyes approval of invoices and payments above a certain not-very-high limit
The poor financial controls sounds like one that happened here in the States recently where a member of the finance department of a major college with rights to purchase up to $10,000 without a second signoff embezzeled something like 40 million dollars by making purchases of electroncis just under the cap and selling them through a company that was in on it and would fence the stuff for a cut.
It went on for over a decade until she pissed the wrong person off and they decided to take a closer look at her purchases.