11/17/2023
Alert student Ana Montalvo posted this review of the 1/15/2023 SA IMA meeting.
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Yesterday I attended the monthly CMA meeting. I really enjoy attending these meetings because I get to meet new people in the accounting field in San Antonio and I also get to hear from speakers on very relevant topics. One of the presenters was Craig Stanland, he was a fraudster who went to prison his crimes, he shared his story, a very familiar story to us now because of all the fraud stories we hear in class every week.
Craig was working for a company who was a client of Cisco as an account manager. At first, he was doing very well and making a lot of money just doing his sales job but with time, the market got more competitive, and he wasn’t selling as much, and he wasn’t making the same commission he was used to. He found out that by taking advantage of Cisco’s warranty policy he could gain more money. He operated a service contract fraud in which he managed service contracts for Cisco networking parts. He made up hundreds of fake service requests to Cisco to replace “defective” parts. Cisco would then ship these parts to different addresses that Craig had access to. He would send back older or third party parts to Cisco, he would find these parts on Ebay and buy them very cheap. Afterwards, he sold the new parts for more money. Craig was not justifying his actions, but he was speaking to his state of mind during those moments. He said he felt like he needed to keep up with his lifestyle and felt a lot of pressure to keep making more and more money. He knew he was doing wrong but he kept going.
Eventually, he got sloppy, and Cisco found out what he was doing, he was caught and found out when the FBI raided his house and charged him with one count of mail fraud. He was arrested and sentenced to 2 years in federal prison, 3 years of supervised release, and payment of $834,307.00 in restitution.
Like your interview with Aaron Beam from Health South, Craig Stanland’s presentation was very effective. Hearing from the fraudster’s mouth why they did what they did was a different perspective. I like that he did not try to sugarcoat it, he explained the way he felt at the time, but he now takes responsibility for his actions and has been sharing his story ever since he got out of prison.
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