She Stole for 10 Years Before Anyone Noticed [The Bad Hire Ep. 43]

00:00:00 If you do this, we're going to have the cops come in and drag you out. You're kidding. I mean, that's... She showed no remorse. People's wallets started going missing around the office. The $1.3 million he made went to sports betting, gambling, vacations, private school tuition, and a down payment on a $92,000 Range Rover. This is The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories about the worst employees. We fired him, of course. People are crazy. It's like an HR nightmare. Right? One bad hire stole all of it. Crazy stuff. She got what she deserved. Oh. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and every week we dive into real-life stories from the wild world

00:00:42 of work and what can happen when the wrong person gets the job. These stories aren't just crazy. They're cautionary tales about lessons learned the hard way. Let's get started. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Bad Hire. The show with the best stories from the wild world of work. Wild world of work. If you're a hiring manager, stick around. Welcome, everybody. You'll love this. We're going to tell some great stories about some maybe first-day flame-outs, interview bombs, OJ kind of crashes at the end. OJ crashes. Not OJ. Yeah. We're not talking about orange juice today, Tor, guys.

00:01:23 He's a bad hire, too. Oh, yeah. Well, there's that OJ, and then there's orange juice. So I thought, you know, got to be careful there. You should have just known who OJ is. OJ Simpson? I know who OJ Simpson is. So I'm joined by Morgan and Nathan. Welcome, guys. How are you guys doing? Good. Doing good. We got some good stories sent in today. We have a few ones that were sent in by people. So thank you for watching the show and for sending in your stories. And then we have some guest segments where we've, like, actually pre-hopped on with people, and they're telling stories to us, like, you know, people out in the world of work, hiring managers, stuff like that. So it's been engaging lately. It's been fun. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Congratulations to you guys because we had millions of views last month.

00:02:05 That was fun. Yeah. For sure. Thanks to the audience. Thanks for watching. Wow. Yep. It's just a couple of the clips. Just, like, carry us. I don't know. I mean, I set goals, but, I mean, still. Yeah. Just the way it's accelerating right now is really shocking. To me. Cool. It's just, like, hockey sticking right now. Yeah. So. We're at 12. Do you know what that means? 12. Oh, yeah. It goes up like this. Hockey sticking? Mm-mm. It just means, like. Climbing up at a rapid rate. Yeah, like a hockey stick. I see. Gotcha. Hockey stick. We're at 12,000 followers on Instagram, which is fun. And our next goal is 200 million. So. Yeah. Easy. Easy to attain. Mr. Beast, we're coming for you. Hockey sticking. Yeah. Coming. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think this is a great place for hiring managers, you know, to hang out, recruiters.

00:02:48 I don't know. If you want to hear some stories you'll relate to. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're into hiring people or, and even managing them, sometimes these things will resonate with you. You know, I was telling somebody the other day that, you know, the hope is, you know, I think there are funny stories, right? But the hope is not to make fun of anyone, but they're just, sometimes there are funny stories. Yeah. And some people, and people do act crazy. Yeah. So, you know, I'm, I'm sure if you act crazy, we might tell your story. Yeah. And, but at the same time, you know, part of this is, is just knowing how difficult the job or recruiting, how difficult the hiring manager, HR, you know, the challenging situations

00:03:31 that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. And so it's great. And I think they're unsung and I'd appreciate it. You know, when we do so many social media posts and it's pretty interesting, the perception of HR and, and, and, and from employees, you know, you hear when it's split, but you, you know, we'll do something. We'll get a lot of posts. I think we had 150,000 engagements last month. Right. And you'll, it's a lot of times there'll be employees saying, oh, HR is there only for the company. HR is bad. HR this. They, you know, don't trust HR. And I, I think that was, is probably disheartening to most people, um, that, you know, that are doing that for a living. Cause the overwhelming majority of the ones I spend time with are just super committed

00:04:15 to just employee care. I mean, it is, you know, I guess maybe when you're, you're an employee, you're doing something wrong. It just feels like they're against you. But maybe you're doing something wrong and they're trying to do their very, very best at that point. But yeah. Yeah. That's part of the engagement too, is the, I feel like the hiring people, the HR people of the world, they're getting into the comments too, almost kind of defending that whole group of people saying, well, no, we, that's not how it is. We actually do care. Yeah. And that's, that's been part of the fun too, of like the guest segments that we do and just the stories that are sent in. But it's the whole relatability factor has been really cool because we tell these kind of crazy stories and then the people will come onto our show and give us a guest segment.

00:04:56 And they're like, oh man, I thought I was the only one who had that insane story of, of this person that I hired, I advocated for. And then they ended up being absolutely terrible. I thought it was something with me. And that's kind of another whole aspect of our show is like, no, you're not alone. Yeah. This is happening to lots of people all around. Yeah. Right. So it's been fun. Yeah. Speaking of guest segments, if you submit a story, whether you do a guest segment, whether you submit it in writing, we read it, you know, you're going to enter our contest, get a chance to win 10,000 bucks. We want to, we're going to send $10,000 to the best story of the year. We'll do that here in a, in a month or, in a month or two. And, uh, I'm excited about, uh, I'm excited about that. And I hope, I hope, you know, people were dead serious. Yeah. And I write a check, get a stack of cash, whatever it is.

00:05:38 We hit our 10,000 bucks. We hit our one year. Let's figure that out. Let's figure that out guys. The big check. How we're going to hand it out. How we're going to, you know. Everybody wrote below in the comments for the big check. I've been saying the big check. The big check costs $4,500. But if you're okay with getting the big check for 6,500 or 5,500, then you'll be okay. Exactly. Yeah. But the stack of cash, I feel like is an accident waiting to happen. If somebody walks out of here with $10,000 on a briefcase, it's like, yeah, we're just going to be putting them in that situation. Well, you guys send us your best Bad Heart story. So, yeah. You can go to thebadheart.com and learn how to do it. Yeah. So, I've got, I've got, uh. Let's do it. A woman who stole from the newspaper. Stole. Stole. That's Ken's favorite word.

00:06:18 That's Ken's favorite word today. Stole. Stole. Put it on the poll. Stole. Steal or stole or stole. The woman who stole from the newspaper. There you go. All right. Let me read this to you. I spent 13. We just lost three viewers when that happened. I just, I just, I just, I didn't like the way I said stole. That's sad. I spent 13 years in the newspaper industry. And, uh, one of the biggest, and one of the biggest stories I ever lived through was one that never got fully told from, like, from the inside. Uh, the Nogales International is a small community newspaper in, uh, Southern Arizona. Uh, it's the kind of paper that plays an outsized kind of role in, uh, in the town.

00:07:00 And the business manager there had control over the accounts receivable. Oh, no. Yeah. This is what always happens. I swear. Access to all the money, all the accounting. She was, as a prosecutor later put it, uh, the financial backbone of the organization. From September 1996 to October 2006. Good night. Ten years. Mm-hmm. She was manipulating financial transactions and taking money that wasn't hers. By the time it was over, she had pleaded guilty to attempted fraudulent schemes and confirmed, Wow. And the confirmed figure was $270,000, but the company's own CFO stood up in court and said they believed she took more than that, closer to $320,000. Oh, dang.

00:07:40 Still, over 10 years, still, I think they're lucky it was only that much. Yeah. For real. Right. It's $32,000 a year. Well, it's a little bit that you can skim off. Yeah, skim off the top without it being too recognizable. Yeah, maybe that's what it was. And, and they could improve the full amount because she had destroyed, uh, some of the evidence. She showed no remorse. What? When the company gave her the opportunity to sit down and discuss the case, she didn't show up. I guess you don't show up when you know you're caught. She was sentenced to 180 days in jail. What? With work release. 180. Five years probation in order to repay the money at $1,000 a month. Oh, she got off easy. That's like a rent payment. That's not even nothing bad. I skipped car payment. That's bigger than that. My fiance's, uh, school debt is more than that a month.

00:08:21 I mean, come on guys. Where I sat inside that newsroom, the warning signs had been there. The losses I believed were greater than, than what was ever proven in court. The editor and publisher had public, uh, said publicly that it had taken an enormous financial toll on the paper, uh, and an emotional one to everyone. Um, we felt a sense of betrayal. That's the part that stays with me. 10 years right under everyone's noses. And then, and the number that made it, uh, uh, to court was a number she, uh, couldn't make disappear. That's wild. So this is like so true. And you know, this newspaper, the really, it's just a small business really, right? I mean, this newspaper sounds big, but it's a small business. And, uh, these financial crimes that people commit in these, in these small companies are

00:09:04 sometimes absolutely devastating to you. Like destroy the business. Some owner believes that he's saved for retirement, that he has money in his, in his company. And then one day he finds that his payroll checks bounce or something. And then, you know, it all, it all unravels and, uh, and you know, someone, someone's in trouble. And so, yeah, it's, it's really, really tough. I, I think people have to even small companies and maybe AI will help with this. I think it will. Um, with people have to do a better job of auditing on a regular basis and verifying, making sure, um, you know, that everything is, is, is right. And I know that we're, we're evaluating tools all the time around our, around our, our financial

00:09:48 health. Yeah. But I mean, 1996 to 2006, they're probably just kind of rolling on some paper and just easy to kind of take a little bit off and then you just never, never even know. I hope it's getting harder. Yeah. Right. But yeah, it's devastating. And it would, it hurt everybody, right? Everybody gets hurt. Oh yeah. All the employees are hurt when that happens. I mean, $30,000 a month stolen from a Amazon would, you know, barely be, no, but it's maybe, but from a small business, that's a, that's a huge percentage. That's, that's insane. Man. Let's add. So here's another one. Um, ghosted by the U S government. All right. What? It's a good title. Good title. Years ago, I managed a company that sold frozen steaks door to door.

00:10:32 And you can imagine. Oh, this was a submitted story. It was this one. Yep. I remember this one. Yeah. All right. As you can imagine, it was extremely difficult to find anyone to actually stick with the job, let alone be good at it. So when you do, it's like finding gold. I hired everyone willing to, uh, everyone willing to try it, looking for a little nugget of gold. So salesmen, salesmen are notoriously difficult to manage and in walks a young man in his early twenties, great look, great communication skills, quick learner. He didn't know the area. Well, uh, he didn't know that area well because he was from out of state, but he was a natural in no time at all. He's one of our top salespeople. So we do what any good company would do.

00:11:16 When you find a nugget of gold, we start polishing him up. He's making loads of money. So we promote him to trainer. He excels at that. We start preparing him for management. And the whole time the crew is spending time with him in and out of the office and developing a kind of a deep personal relationships with him. I mean, after all, he was from out of state and really, uh, the only people he knew in the area were this coworker. So that's where all his friends were. Yeah. One of our female sales women especially took a liking to him and developed what looked like was going to be a Hallmark kind of office romance. Um, he was perfect. The kind of kid that finds a lifelong career in sales and makes the company, you know, loads of money for years before he outgrows them. Right. So then it happens.

00:11:58 Poof. Like a ghost. He's gone. Oh no. One day there, one day there, one day, not no note, no goodbye, no explanation. Didn't even break up with the office girlfriend. Dang. That's so sad. Phone disconnected, apartment emptied, out, just gone. We checked the jails, the hospitals and filed a missing person report a few days later. People don't just disappear like this. You know, I mean, as a manager, I'm kind of left dealing with this emotional chaos. All these people, his friends, I'm sure his girlfriend, you know, that was caused by his disappearance. People, you know, people missed work. They lost income. The girlfriend could barely work.

00:12:38 She was so heartbroken. Man. And I'm losing money on lost sales the whole time. And, you know, and I can't make heads of tails of what happened. Then about six weeks later, one of my guys comes into the office yelling, I found him. I found him. He's been on the news. Dead? Nope. Jail? Nope. What? He was testifying as a star witness in a high profile federal case against a well-known organized, against a well-known organized crime syndicate or something on the other side of the country. Whoa. Turns out he was in witness protection and we didn't even know his real name. Whoa. There's some crazy stakes right there. For sure. For sure. Austin, you got that?

00:13:20 No? He for sure. Steaks? Yeah. I got it. Okay. Got it. He for sure. He had beef. They had beef with each other. Yeah. They had beef with each other. He's been holding that for the whole story. I know. He was just sitting waiting. Came to it. Don't have a cow. At the beginning. No. It was kind of funny because when I was reading this at first, when it was submitted to us, I thought, oh, he's on drugs. Like, he just disappeared. Yeah. Because we see it all the time on these episodes where they're on drugs and then they just like vanish and then everybody's like, where are they? Their wife's calling. Their mom's calling trying to figure out where they are. Yeah. Just come missing. This guy had a good excuse. Yeah. He was in witness protection. Yeah. I mean, you know, when you're witness protection, you got to have a life. You got to have a life. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that happens. At the end of the life you're living, you got to go do the thing.

00:14:02 Right. Yeah. And then, you know. So, I guess when you go into witness protection, you can't say goodbye, right? Is that part of it? You just have to go out in the middle of the night? I don't know. I've only seen a movie, so I don't really know. I'm not familiar. I don't know. And also, I feel like since he was, so he was probably in witness protection when he was working for this company, probably trying to keep a low profile selling steaks. Yeah. Like, I didn't even know there was a door-to-door steak salesman. Heck yeah. But. You ever had Omaha Steaks? You never had. No. Oh, I guess the Omaha Steaks is. Okay. That's the thing. Yeah. But, yeah. And I guess he, you know, settled down and made a life. And then they were like, yep, you got to go testify. Yeah. That sucks. When I owned one of my first houses, you know, it was a young guy coming up and steak salesman,

00:14:43 me and salesman showed up at the door. And, you know, I got this package deal and it was great. And I bought them and they were just terrible. Oh, really? So you knock on the door and say, nice to meet you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, it was good stuff. Austin, you got the one? Tell me what? Nice to meet you. He'll be here all week. What is the deal? Sorry. All right. Let's go. You should tell the jokes. I'm not random. There's a lot of those. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by B-Checks. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice. Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's B-Checks. Lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built in fraud prevention.

00:15:26 We help you hire the right people. Now, B-Checks plugs into over 100 HRIS and ATS systems. So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top level service. Protect your team. Protect your reputation. Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X.io. This is Jonathan Breeden. Who interviewed with him? I think it was Emma. Was he going to do it? Yeah. So Jonathan Breeden. I was supposed to do that one. Jonathan's a lawyer. He's from North Carolina. And he does legal services for families. But he has a business, Breeden Law Firm. And they've been in that Raleigh area for like 25 years.

00:16:09 So he's been running that business. Cool. Actually, it could have been Corey, too. It's either Emma or Corey. Okay. Yeah. We'll let's hear what he had to say. We've been growing pretty fast over the last five or six years. We had a pretty good marketing team out of Ohio. And then we hired a business coach, a guy named Richard James, who happens to live in Charlotte now. He lives at Piper Glen. But when I met him, he was living in Phoenix. And we joined that program back in 2020. And we were able to really start growing the business. We had leads. We did not manage them. So we had to, you know, get a CRM and start making outbound phone calls and develop email drip campaigns and, you know, stuff like that that allowed us to grow. And then I had to become a better manager, right? I was not a great manager of people.

00:16:50 And I'm still not. But we did get big enough to hire middle management and sort of learn to fuss at them. And then they sort of take it and then they go and talk to the employees. You know, it's, you know, when it came to me managing attorney, it was not good. I'm just not a good manager of people, to be honest. You know, I have very high expectations. I have little tolerance for bullshit. And I've never had a job that I absolutely needed. So I don't know what it's like to be an employee, right? I mean, I had college jobs when I was at NC State and, you know, in law school, but not like a job job, right? Like with bullshit, right? Because I started this firm straight out of law school. And so, you know, and of course, I don't understand this younger generation and safe spaces and

00:17:34 all that kind of stuff. So we had a fair amount of turnover, right? As you grow and scale and you're dealing with young attorneys and young people, you know, trying to figure it out. And, you know, so, you know, we've had more turnover than we would like, but I think that's the nature of the game, you know, sort of go from there. I don't think you see that a whole lot where somebody's like, yeah, I'm not a very good manager. Yeah, for real. Not my strength. I don't know. He's pretty self-aware. Yeah. He sees himself as like a business owner and his whole life he's been one, right? Been a part of it. So he's like, you know, doesn't get the employee experience, you know? Yeah. And so he's tried to put a layer of people between him and other people, you know?

00:18:17 Yeah. I like to hear stories from business owners. I think sometimes business owners should grow up like that or have some of the most challenging situations and selecting people, hiring people, you know, managing people, all of that. And they just have such a unique perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Because they view, they view all the operations through a completely different lens than everybody else around, you know, because they're managing things, they're running, they're running things, you know? And speak from my own experience that, you know, I'm willing to work, you know, 18 hour days and, you know, just like, it's, you know, there's just like expectation that like, you know, everybody should want that. And, you know, we're not all driven the same, you know, we're not, we don't have all the

00:18:58 same, uh, rewards. We don't have the same outcomes, you know, different points in our life. And to think that everyone should just like be just like me is, is, you know. Beg in, back your expectations. But I expect you to work, I expect you to work 18 hours. Yeah. I'm, I'm at 19 right now. Okay. All right. Okay. I mean, everybody else is okay, but yeah, I'm coming down. I'm expecting. Yeah. Oh man. All right. So what's next? That's cool. All right. All right. I think you're next, right? Yeah. I got last. All right. What do you got going on? Okay. Uh, I don't know if this one was submitted, if we went out and found this one, but. I might recognize it. Let me see. Yeah. Or I'll get started. Yeah. Yeah. You go ahead. My first one. Okay. Is this. We hired a bookkeeper with 11 years of experience, a CPA certification, solid references, and a personality

00:19:44 that would make you genuinely feel good about handling, uh, handing her the keys of the accounts. And so that's what we did. We handed her the keys. That's always kind of where it starts. What none of us knew was that she had also quietly stolen the identity of man that she went to church with. That's crazy. His name, his social security number, his banking information, all that she needed was access to our accounts payable system to put the whole thing together. The scheme was almost elegant. When a legitimate vendor invoice came in, she would log it. Then a day later, she would create a duplicate check for the same amount. The payee was always that man from church.

00:20:25 The remittance address was always a PO box that she controlled. She would deposit the checks herself and then move on to the next one for three years. She processed thousands of transactions and every single one of them looked exactly right. Unless you happen to be comparing the two databases that were never supposed to be compared side by side. But one of our junior accountants started doing exactly that one day in 2023. She told him that she thought it was a rounding error. He believed her. She was the bookkeeper. But the whole thing collapsed the way that these things usually do. Not from anyone brilliant, but from the paperwork. So a state auditor ran a routine compliance review, cross-referenced the vendor tax IDs.

00:21:08 The man from her church had never even been paid by the company, never heard of the company. And he called the attorney general's office. By then, she had processed $2.1 million out the door. Wow. She pleaded guilty to three counts of embezzlement and one count of forgery and was sentenced in earlier this year, May 2026. Anywhere from 30 months to 20 years in prison. I guess it's still in movement. In order to pay back every cent of that $2.1 million. So she still owes us that. And those references for what it's worth, those are real. But the rest kind of fell apart. Well, there were the auditors there. We got comments the other day on a video and they were like, where are your auditors?

00:21:50 Or where were the auditors in this situation? And it's like, there you go. They figured it out in this situation. There's an outside auditor, but still. That's kind of the whole thing. I mean, we get lots of comments where it's like, where's the background check? Where is the audit? Yeah. That's kind of the, people respond like that all the time. When something bad happens, they go, did you do a background check on them beforehand? Yeah. It's always like the first thing, when something bad happens, the first thing they do is go, did you run a background check? Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. And that duty of care, like we've talked about that a lot this week, that is like a legal exposure today. Yeah. Like, because you did, if you don't run it, you could have.

00:22:34 Yeah. Right? So this is a tale that's been told. Yeah. Thousands of thousands of times. It's just, it's just making. And it's just, you know, you hate it because it just means people got hurt. It's not just a crime against the company. Mm-hmm. Because it hurts everyone. When a company's not doing well, people don't get the raises they had that they're supposed, you know, they could have. They don't get the bonuses they could have. They don't create opportunities. They don't hire. So when they try to go, oh, look, it really costs us a ton. Now they, it costs a lot of people a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a crazy story.

00:23:15 Yeah. But, okay. So next I have a guest segment. Would you mind pulling that up, Austin? So this is with Jeff. Jeff's the founder of Huckabye, a super cool company. They do a lot of stuff with like SEO, but also AEO and GEO stuff for pretty much for how well you're found on, you know, ChatGPT and the rest. He used to work at Overstock, the big company. And he was kind of telling me that he was mentored by the guy, by one guy, I forget who his name is, who, and he was mentored by Warren Buffett. Cool. So like the mentor of his mentor was mentored by Warren Buffett. It's kind of cool. Awesome. Two degrees away. Yeah. So Jeff's super cool. And it was really cool to connect with him. And this is just a quick story he had with all the stuff that he's running these days.

00:23:56 We had a hire that, I can't remember if I hired him or not, or inherited him, who was actively stealing money from the company. He had registered himself as a, or his brother-in-law as a affiliate. Affiliate marketing is like you go through a coupon site and then they get, because they get the cookie or whatever, end up buying, they get a commission fee. Well, he had set up this little round robin thing where every thousandth transaction would get attributed to this. And he stole, I think it was something like 250 grand, I think, over three years. And Patrick and I had the cops come in and arrest him and walk him up.

00:24:39 And that was on purpose to really show that, you know, do that, you're going to jail. That affiliate marketing program must have been bumping to make that much money. Yeah, it was over, I think it was, was that Overstock? I don't know. That's crazy. That's wild. Then he sent a message to the other people. A coupon skimming thing. Yeah. Wow. That's insane. Yeah. So then he sent a message. Good job, Jeff. Sent a message to everybody else pretty much saying like, yeah, if you do this, we're going to have the cops come in and drag you out. You're kidding. I mean, that's, I don't know if that's just a common thing because he was pretty much in e-commerce, you know, it's an Overstock. So who knows, like you said, their affiliate marketing program was probably like getting thousands or millions of purchases.

00:25:23 Yeah. And so then he just kind of like, boop, just kind of marked himself. One hundred thousand and a thousand, so it's every thousandth. And then to make 250,000, that's a lot of purchases. Yeah. Isn't that insane? It's a lot of thousands. Yeah. A lot of affiliate. Yeah. Yeah. Fees. It's crazy. But Jeff was, Jeff was super legit. I highly recommend him and his services. We'll, we'll shout him out on LinkedIn too. Yeah. He was really qualified. Huckabye? Huckabye. Yeah. I spent some time on their website this week after you shared it with me. He looks familiar. I don't know why. Very, very, very cool. You know, great service. Yeah. He's out and just super needed right now by people because SEO and AEO changing so rapidly. Oh yeah. And just got to be good at it. Yeah. It's cool. We'll shout out his, his, his website, Huckabye and check it out for your own website.

00:26:04 It does like a little audit of your SEO and stuff. It's cool. Okay. Here's my last story for this. So one time we brought on a new chief communications officer and on paper, he's exactly what a comms department would want. He was actually a former white house press aid. He was super polished and articulate. And he walked in one day and immediately started giving interviews about the importance of transparency. He was making $186,000 a year and he looked every bit a part of it. And the spring we found out that he was checking into rehab for six weeks. So this was actually fully approved. It was covered by benefits. And when he came back, we were supportive. You know, we were just trying to be supportive of like whatever he's going through. We say all the right things, but recovery being a process, you know, take your time.

00:26:47 And about a week later, people's wallets started going missing around the office. So first it's one staffer's debit card. She figures maybe she's left it somewhere. Then a second staffer notices a charge that she didn't make, 481 bucks at a smoke shop four blocks up the street. Then cash disappears from the break room. Then a third card, more and more charges all from the same smoke shop randomly. And we pull surveillance footage from the store. The time, the timestamps line up almost exactly with that chief communication officer guy's schedule. The clerk from the place remembered him. He always bought the same thing, an herbal supplement commonly used to manage opioid, opioid withdrawal symptoms, which is illegal in Minnesota.

00:27:33 It's not something you really steal a co-worker's credit card to buy unless you've already run through your own credit cards. So he was fired on July 1st. Minneapolis police submitted the case to the county attorney for criminal charges the following week. He had earned more in that one year than most of the people that he was stealing from make combined in four years. Yeah. That's insane. That's sad. So it's also kind of sad because it sounds like he came in, had it all together. Yeah. And then had this whole issue and then just kind of like fell off the map after that pretty much. So the combination of like withdrawal and stealing from everybody else. I mean, I guess you could be addicted to that drug as much as you can.

00:28:16 Yeah. You know, or maybe not being on that drug hurts so much. That the... You know, because you deal with the addiction of the desire of the drug. So, you know, you just trade one for another. But, you know, this is one of the things, you know, HR leaders put up with, I think, a lot. Addiction's real. Yeah. And they're having to try to help people on the regular. But... Yeah, it's on the other side of things. Yeah, this is kind of a point of no return, you know, when you start stealing debit cards. I don't... I never get that. You know, when you steal a debit card and you go somewhere and you use it. Right? I mean... Logically. It's in your hand. You hand it to them. You look around. Yeah, I guess there's cameras here.

00:28:58 Yeah. Then you go another one and do it again. You know, it's like... Yeah. Pretty soon they're going to visit the smoke shop. Maybe that's part of the addiction. You know, he just knows no matter what. Yeah, he just knows he's going to burn out. Death brute. Yeah. But hopefully more years. I don't know. I've seen some things too. There's a lot of stealing and drug use in these stories. And yeah, I'm pretty sad. Yeah. Yeah, there is. All right. I think it's one of the reasons... One of the ways people, you know, blow up and burn out. Mm-hmm. You know? Good employees have bad days. Good employees have bad seasons. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sure. It's true. Yeah. All right, Morgan. I think I'm done. What you got? All right. Hopefully yours are happier than mine.

00:29:38 I hope so too. All right. So I run a small residential soil testing company in Southern Alabama. Good reputation. Tight operation. We bring on someone to manage the front office. Let's call him Phil. For a few years, things seem fine. Then we notice the numbers are off. By the time we notice, the numbers are off by 834,000. Oh, wow. But here's a part that makes the story worth telling. While Phil was embezzling from us, he was simultaneously collecting Social Security disability benefits. He had told the federal government he was unable to work and he was, in fact, very much working. Specifically, very much working the register on cash he was skimming from our accounts. For five years, Phil filed for his disability paperwork in his expense reports in parallel.

00:30:20 Social Security has an earnings threshold. Go above it and you no longer are eligible for the benefits. He was earning significantly above it. He just wasn't reporting any of it. When federal prosecutors added everything up, the total across both schemes came to $895,000. Phil pleaded guilty to the theft of government money, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. And there was apparently a third scheme involving someone else's identity that prosecutors didn't get into the details on. But suffice to say that Phil was keeping several plates spinning at once. What I tell every HR manager I work with now is that their screening for office positions is this. The most dangerous person in any small company is the one who controls both the outgoing checks and the incoming paperwork.

00:31:01 The second most dangerous person, it turns out, is the one who's already been lying to the federal government before you ever hired him. Well, there you go. It is true. Before you hired him. Exactly. Yeah, there's lots of these stories that have that same theme today of like, whoever's in control of the money. Yeah. So you got to look out. We've got a lot of embezzlement ones on here recently. Yeah. But I have a guest segment and his name is Bryce Clark and he's a business owner, founder, and product design director at Dalcom Tech. And he is skilled in hands-on design, fabrication, industrial automation, and testing of electromechanical prototypes and equipment. Yeah, Bryce. I talked to Bryce. I had like the guest segment with him. He was super cool. Yeah. So if you watch either like a clip of, you know, somebody possibly in the Air Force who's butt next to the planes, they have those huge headsets on.

00:31:47 Oh, yeah. We talked about this guy. Yeah. This guy's really cool. Or even like, I think the sidelines of like an NBA game, like the refs and whoever has like those big headphones. He makes those headphones. Oh, no kidding. Super cool. So he started this company out of his garage and now has all these cool contracts. So anyway, Bryce is awesome. It's really cool. Steve Jobs. Yeah. Same thing. So he had a couple of good stories. We had one worker and I mean, it might have been that because we had rented a house because we saved money on a commercial building by renting a house. It's, I mean, it's got all the space we needed. There's an open plan floor plan in the place. And so we set up our shop in there and it's all desktop and, you know, lightweight manufacturing. It's just, you know, soldering things together and things. But I think because of that sort of relaxed atmosphere, people took it way too far.

00:32:30 So we had someone on her very first day. We hadn't really even shown her how to do the job yet. Half hour into it, she opens up her phone and takes the speakerphone call, which we have a very quiet. There's like, you know, six of us just sitting in a room all slaughtering. You know, maybe you have some headphones or something. It's pretty chill, quiet. But she's got this thing on speakerphone and she's having this phone call and we're like, wait, what's going on? I need to train you how to do what you're doing. I don't even know what you're doing right now. And she went for an hour. She just kept talking. Yeah, we're all like, it's a little disruptive too, because the rest of us are trying to focus. And we're just being this entire conversation. Like, it's a podcast you didn't want to tune into. You know, it was odd. I think now I've learned to be a little more assertive in order to say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to like not do this because, you know, it's work and such.

00:33:17 So that behavior, even though like I did, you know, sort of address it and say, hey, you know, maybe we can not do that in future, did happen again. And this time, extremely personal. There was the state social workers on the line and there was like all kinds of inside family information you're hearing that I just wish I could have unheard. We're all sitting there like, you know, there's it. You can walk 20 feet that way in Glumpside. So that was interesting. She was really like gracious about it. And everything she was like, oh, you don't have to pay me for that time. And I was like, I get it. You're going through this really dramatic thing, which unfortunately I know the details of now. But and her life was really difficult. That's a lot on the first day, too. You know, some people just hear too much. Yeah. And I think some people just have the lack, you know, besides all the stuff she's going through, is the lack of social awareness.

00:34:03 Yeah. You know, we had the story last time that I was here where it was like the guy showed up late to his own job interview. He's like, oh, sorry, I have stuff to do. I'm busy. It's like people have the social thing like, hey, this is your job. You're like a little professional. Like don't. For real. Don't show up late. Don't just like take posts for, you know, first day personal phone calls on speakerphone. Yeah. In the one room. Just like I think some people lack that basic kind of social awareness of stuff. Yeah. Which is common sense. Kind of. You know, I don't think it's hard to be a great employee. I really don't. So it's there's a lot of people not doing a great job. I was like. Yeah. You know. Well, sometimes you have to jump through more hoops to be like. I don't think it's hard to be great. Yeah. I don't. I just I think most people lack some awareness.

00:34:47 Yeah. You know, lack the desire to be great, you know, to try to be great. Yeah. I guess I agree. You've got to be great at their role. There's some people. You know, there's a lot of apathy in the way they approach work. For sure. Yeah. I think sometimes the difference between kind of subpar and excellent is just a couple little things. Yeah. A couple little attention to detail. I agree. A hundred percent. Just minor tweaks. And, you know, don't don't just do completely like off the off the rails things. Just like be normal. That's a good place to start. Just be normal. You know, don't play your life story. Don't give them a podcast. They don't want to listen to. Yeah. We had an employee here who ended up getting fired. But I remember one day he took a call with his girlfriend very publicly out in like

00:35:28 the operation suite and he was just screaming at her. No way. Yeah. Just fighting. I was like, OK. I'm glad I didn't. Yeah. Now you do. Yeah. Now you do. If you didn't. Thanks for letting me know. The more you know. Man. That's crazy. All right. I have another story. Oh, cool. So I work at a federal law enforcement agency and we bring on someone in IT support whose job is to provision devices, cell phones mostly. So I guess giving employees phones if they need them. He has access to the ordering system, access to the inventory logs, and the ability to request phones on behalf of the agency. Between 2021 and 2025, he requested 4,800 phones that nobody asked for. Whoa. He sold them to resellers. The 1.3 million he made went to sports betting, gambling, vacations, private school tuition,

00:36:14 and a down payment on a $92,000 Range Rover. Oh. Dang. What a combo. Oh, wow. You might be wondering how someone steals 4,800 cell phones from a federal law enforcement agency. They're a federal law enforcement agency too. Over four years without anyone noticing. The answer is that the ordering system was automated. The invoices were processed by a completely separate department and the people reviewing the telecom budget were not the same people managing the device inventory. So nobody was comparing the two lists and nobody thought to check. The scheme didn't end because of an audit. It ended because a woman in Kentucky who bought an iPhone online noticed something was off. It turned out the phone belonged to the federal government. She called the agency to report it and then the agency traced the serial number.

00:36:58 The serial number led back to him. He was caught by a private citizen returning lost property. He was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison and ordered to repay $1.3 million in the 4,008 T&T contracts he'd opened. Meanwhile, he'd been running up service fees for years and the agency was being billed for lines nobody was using. The Range Rover was presumably repossessed. Oh. That's sad. Yeah. That was my favorite part of the story. RIP Range Rover. Dang. That's crazy. So wait. What happened to the other 4,700 phones? They're all marked that this phone is owned by the FBI or something? I don't know. And then people were just like, eh, whatever. Maybe it was like deep in the settings when she found it. Maybe. Like, phones you buy on the street.

00:37:38 Like, hey, you want a cell phone? Yeah. Yeah. Except for the government. He's probably selling them to resellers like that. He probably was a reseller himself selling to other resellers. Reseller in that sense sounds a little sketch. That's insane. Sketch. Wow. Yeah. 1.3 million is crazy, too. What if he did it in 12 months? Okay. Sports betting, gambling, vacations, private school tuition, and a Range Rover. That's a funny combo. Like, the irresponsible side of the sports betting, and then Range Rover is kind of fun and flashy, and then, oh, you know, he's paying for private school. It's good. Good for him. What's the thing? He's like, let me get my kids to school, you know? Let me get the kids to school. He's not a monster. Yeah. He's not a horrible person. He's got to go to private school. Yeah. That's wild. Wow. You're right.

00:38:19 That's insane. So what ended up happening? Did he went to jail? Was it? It says that he was 12 months in federal prison, and he was ordered to repay the 1.3, and then the 4,800 AT&T contracts he'd opened. Meanwhile, okay, they were, like, running up service fees, so I guess he probably had to pay that back, too. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because the agency was being billed for their lines. Well, they say pay that back, but, I mean, like, it's not like he's going to have money to ever pay all that back. That's what's crazy. Like, the story earlier where, like, okay, hey, now he had to pay back the $2.1 million. What do you do? What percentage of restitution actually is paid back? I don't know. It's got to be so small. I don't know. We should look that up, because, let's see. Well, these people's livelihoods were stealing $2 million or $1 million, and then now you

00:39:03 go to zero, and now you owe me $2 million. So, like, what do you do with that? Yeah, they crush some company, steal from them, and then, you know. Let's see if AI will tell me. And now who's going to hire you, because you just stole everything. Well, I was just about to say that. Yeah. And then that person is going to go. So, he was in jail for a short period of time. He's going to go get another job. Yeah. Somebody's going to hire him. Mm-hmm. Somebody who didn't do a background check. Yeah. Is going to hire him. I guess so. And who knows if he'll ever be able to be around the money ever again. Yeah. You know, or if he's just going to do something completely random and small and light. Yeah. But what are you looking at? Are you looking at a receipt? I'm looking at... There's no, like, percentage, but everything says, like, a fraction. Yeah, it's got to be.

00:39:44 It's what they're saying. Yeah. And it's not guaranteed to be fully paid back if they're in prison, I guess. Yeah. That makes sense. I don't know how much prison pays. The total owed back that while incarcerated is not fixed. And if you're in prison, they say, like, you have, like, a monthly pay period of, like, $25. So, you're, like, normally giving out your monthly... Yeah. That's crazy. Man, it's insane. I mean, $1.3 million to $25 a month is a little bit of a big deal. Meaning hire the right people. Hire the right people. For sure. Do a really good process. Find great people. Yeah. Don't let this happen. Yeah. HR holds the line. Yeah. I agree. It's true. Well, that's it. Hey, thanks. Appreciate you guys.

00:40:25 It was fun. Nice work. Some good stories. Some good stories. Yeah, the two first stories were submitted, and then the rest of the stories were sourced. Thanks for our guests. Coming on, too. Yeah, thank you, guys. Hey, listen, we appreciate you. If you like it, you know, like it, share it. Subscribe. You know, write a review. We're about to go live in another five minutes. Subscribe to it. Yeah. That's right. But tell us what you like about the show. We just want you to share it and enjoy it. And submit the buy and hire story. Don't forget the $10,000 we're going to give away here at the end of a year-long worth of shows. Yeah, it's coming up. We'll do a $10,000 deal and give away that prize.

00:41:06 I think it'd be great. Yeah, of course. We're seeing some good stories come in. But until then, we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys. Thank you. thank you