The news that prominent local businesswoman and charity executive Anita Foster-Machado was arrested last year on embezzlement charges caught many Bristol residents off guard.
But she is one of a number of women in the Mountain Empire who’ve been charged, and many convicted, in recent years of embezzlement, a crime that is most often committed by women in their 40s with no criminal history, according to a recent study by Boston consulting firm Marquet International.
-Machado, who is charged with six counts of felony embezzlement and is scheduled to return to Bristol Virginia General District Court Thursday for a hearing, was director of the Bristol Library Foundation.
After her arrest, Bristol Virginia Police Detective Robin McCoy said Foster-Machado, who had direct access to the foundation’s finances, made several unusual purchases, including clothing, purses and tanning visits, totaling more than $20,000 on the organization’s credit cards.
About 57 percent of embezzlers are women, Marquet said in its annual embezzlement study released last month.
Other studies have shown that women account for two out of three embezzlers. In a search of the Bristol Herald Courier’s archives, a vast majority of articles about people accused or convicted of embezzling were women.
Embezzlement is one of two crimes committed more often by women than men, the Marquee study revealed. The other crime is prostitution.
Although more women commit embezzlement than men, the men that do embezzle steal about two-and-a-half times more than women, the study found.
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