EMBEZZLEMENT ($150,000) and FRAUDULENT SCHEMES NOT CHARGED – State v. Ms. F (DMC No. 6773) (Quest Communications Investigated): Ms. F worked for Quest Communications (now Cox Communications) in the marketing department. She developed a credit card processing and marketing company separate from Quest. She was then accused of routing contracts from Quest to her other company without informing them that she owned the other company. This “Vendor Platform” resulted in her making a profit of $150,000 over the course of a year. When this was discovered, Quest attorneys claimed that there was a Conflict of Interest and that they had been defrauded and embezzled from.

We met with their corporate legal counsel and were able to show that this separate vendor company potentially saved them $5,000,000 in transition costs by switching to her platform. We also informed them that they would have to use some other company (whether it was Ms. F’s company or someone else) and that the fees charged were not excessive in any way. We ultimately negotiated a “Consulting Agreement” in which Ms. F had been terminated from the company, but was paid to stay on for several months in order to transfer the credit card processing to a different vendor. No charges were brought against Ms. F, even though she was originally facing mandatory prison time.