Monday, December 12, 2016

Steals $5 million, spends $1 million to play online games

By Donald Sensing

From the "you can't make this stuff up" department:

A man went on a $1m (£800,000) spending spree on the Game of War app after stealing $4.8m from his employer.

Kevin Lee Co, 45, from Sacramento, California, pleaded guilty to fraudulently using company credit cards to steal the money.

Court documents reveal Mr Co spent about $1m of the embezzled funds on Game of War, one of the world's highest grossing mobile games.

Players buy gold and other in-game credits to help build their empires.

Mr Co worked at Holt, a California-based dealer of Caterpillar machinery, for about two years before he started the fraudulent scheme by May 2008.

He became responsible for managing Holt's accounting department a year later and continued to hide the transactions until March 2015.
He left the company a month later.

Over the course of nearly seven years, he used the company card to buy luxury cars, as well as season tickets to NFL team the San Francisco 49ers, and basketball team the Sacramento Kings.
It's very difficult, even for people who work in financial operations, to embezzle such amounts unless the auditors are just phoning it in. The BBC article doesn't say how Co's crimes were uncovered, but I would bet that his extravagant purchases had something to do with it.

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