Employee stole $3.5 million and spent it on resort wedding, sports tickets, feds say

A woman embezzled $3.5 million from a Georgia company and spent it on her daughter’s resort wedding and season sports tickets, federal officials say.

She’s now pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced Nov. 30.

The 59-year-old Suwanee woman was an office manager and executive assistant at a yard care company based in Alpharetta. From 2015 to 2020, she used company credit cards for purchases to fund her “lavish lifestyle,” federal officials said.

McClatchy News could not reach the woman’s attorneys. 

The ex-employee is accused of coding and approving her charges, sometimes passing them off as expenses such as newspaper advertisements, according to the release. 

Officials said she “disseminated the expenditures among different job sites to further conceal the fraud.”

One of the major expenses included $43,469 toward her daughter’s wedding at Barnsley Resort, which she then passed off as a legitimate business expense, officials said in a court filing.

Other expenditures included luxury handbags from Louis Vuitton and Chanel, season tickets to University of Tennessee football and basketball games, clothes, cruises, cash transfers, hotels, furniture, and flights for more than 20 friends and family members.

“(The defendant) worked in a position of trust for a company that expected her to honor that trust,” Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta, said in the release. “Instead, she chose to abuse it and her personal greed not only hurt the company, but everyone who worked for them.”

She’s scheduled to be sentenced in March, officials said.

Alpharetta is a city in the north Atlanta metropolitan area.

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