Most people just take a stapler when they leave a company. An FBI and IRS investigation uncovered that a Sacramento man stole over $4.8m from his company and spent a good chunk of it on the free to play mobile game, Game of War.
BBC news reported that Kevin Lee Co, 45, decided to use his ill-gotten gains to spend over $1 million of the embezzled funds on buying gold and in-game goodies for the wildly popular strategy title Game of War. As you can see in the featured image above, this is the mobile game that used the sex appeal of Kate Upton and then Mariah Carey in commercials to get folks to play.
Lee Co started working at Holt, a Caterpillar machine dealer, in 2008. He became in charge of Holt's accounting department a year later. He was able to hide the transactions until March 2015; he left the company a month later.
In his seven years at Holt, he used the company credit card to buy cars, season tickets, furniture, membership to a fancy golf course, and plastic surgery. He would falsify and manipulate Hot's records in order to hide purchases. Whenever the Bank would ask about the charges on the account, Co would lie and tell them that the charges were approved by Holt and it was back to spending.
Ars Technica acquired a copy of his plea agreement where you can see exactly what he used the company credit card on.
Lee Co ultimately defrauded the company of $4,894,551.61. The agreement goes into detail on how he went about his scheme which involved a number of shady transfers in order launder cash.
Co will be sentenced in May and according to the plea agreement, he could face a maximum of up to 20 years and fines up to $250,000 for the wire fraud. The money laundering charge could also face up to 20 years and $500,000 (or twice the value of the property involved in the transaction) in fines. The Attorney office has recommended a less severe punishment, though, as part of the plea.
If you had a million dollars to burn, what phone game would you guys spend it on? I'm partial to Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes myself.
