A UK-based System Integrator Chillblast product manager was caught stealing nearly $250,000 (£200,000) worth of PC hardware over several years and then selling it on Gumtree and eBay. The company’s product manager, with the help of a former employee, pulled off the heist. Both were found guilty in court today, where they were awarded for their efforts with a jail term.
The dynamic duo sold up to thirty laptops, ten desktop systems, fifty graphics cards, and a large number of storage drives & monitors. The heist occurred during the pandemic and the bitcoin mining boom, so many of these components, especially the graphics cards, could have easily sold above retail pricing.
The Saga of a Seven-Year Embezzlement
Matthew Hudson, now obviously a former employee of the company, was in cahoots with a former employee, 32-year-old Daniel Key. Because he was able to exploit the trust of his colleagues due to his position and access to inventory checklists and customer returns, he was able to get away with it for seven years, from 2013 until 2019. Daniel Key helped Hudson sell these stolen goods and split the profits from their sales.
It took several years for the scheme to be uncovered, as Hudson was very good at hiding his tracks on paper until 2019. Hudson manipulated stock levels, stole items from custom returns, and made new items in the inventory unavailable by showing items as returned and credited. However, an employee spotted a special notebook only the company could have had in stock, listed for sale on Gumtree. Benedict Miles, Chillblast’s managing director, was made aware of this. He got Key’s address from the Gumtree listing and compared the product’s serial number with his inventory list, and they matched.
The next day, Hudson was suspended but attempted a not-very-clean getaway by offering a resignation letter without prejudice and reimbursement for the stolen goods. Chillblast rejected the lowball offer and demanded the return of the work laptop. A Chillblast employee probed his laptop before the hard drive could be returned to him for privacy reasons, finding more incriminating evidence as it contained his phone backup, thus exposing the criminal operation.
Hudson and Key were arrested in 2019 but weren’t charged by the police until 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues between the Crown Prosecution Service and the Dorset Police. Hudson was finally sentenced to jail for three years and eight months on December 7th. He’ll serve half the sentence in prison while the remainder will be served on license (parole). On December 9th, his accomplice, Daniel Key, was sentenced to two years in prison after being found responsible for selling about £109,000 worth of stolen goods.
Though Key was unemployed, Mathew Hudson held a respectable position in the company until he was caught. The total estimated worth of the stolen goods is roughly $250,960, of which Daniel sold $136,773 worth of inventories. Assuming an even split between the two, he flushed his career for $182,570, which averages to about $26,082 over seven years.