A former Meta and Nike employee, who was hired to boost workplace diversity, has been charged for stealing $5 million from the companies to fund a “luxury lifestyle”.
38-year-old Barbara Furlow-Smiles set up fake deals and planned sham events in US to pocket money she charged from the tech and sportswear giants for seven years. Furlow-Smiles has been sentenced to five years in jail and ordered to pay back the money she stole.
“Furlow-Smiles shamelessly violated her position of trust as a DEI executive at Meta’s Facebook to steal millions from the company utilizing a scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fake invoices, and cash kickbacks,” the prosecution said in a statement.
From January 2017 to September 2021, Furlow-Smiles defrauded Facebook as its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) manager by making the company pay several individuals for services that were never provided and then asked those individuals to route the money back to her either in cash or in the form of services.
She also linked her online payment apps like PayPal and Venmo to her Facebook credit cards and paid money to friends, relatives, her babysitter and even her hairdresser for services that were never provided to Facebook.
To cover her tracks, she made up fake reports and invoices detailing these services that she claimed were used to hold events for Facebook. But the events never happened.
She even used Facebook’s money to pay $10,000 for “specialty portraits” and over $18,000 to a preschool for tuition.
“After being terminated from Facebook, she brazenly continued the fraud as a DEI leader at Nike, where she stole another six-figure sum from their diversity program. Her prison sentence reflects the consequences of her decision to orchestrate an intricate scheme to defraud two of her employers for personal profit,” the prosecution said.
In total, she stole over $4.9 million from Facebook and more than $120,000 from Nike.