Saturday, December 26, 2009

Update: California Man Sentenced To 6 Years for $2 Million Embezzlement

Ryan Sawyer Merman, 69, of Santa Rosa, California, was sentenced to 6 years in prison for embezzling more than $1.8 million from STX Inc., where he had been employed as a manager for 12 years. According to prosecutors, Merman's thefts occurred over a 7 year period between March 2002 and 2009. He plead guilty last September to six felony counts that included forgery, elder fraud and embezzlement. He reportedly forged checks from the company for his own benefit.

Read FraudTalk's original post on this story here.

Read the story here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In fact he stole from STX for 12 years but they could prosecute back 7 years. His real total was closer to 2.3 million.

A bigger tragedy,is he had the same responsibilities at the job before his position at STX where he was in charge of checking/deposits and accounting a bicycle store in Santa Rosa called "The Pedal Pusher'. There he took a bit under $900,000 over a 6 year period and because he alone in charge of the books it went un-noticed until he drove the bicycle store out of business in 1997.

He started at STX 6 months later, and behavior of using dormant accounts to migrate money out of STX began almost immediately.

When someone says, "I can make the books look any way you want them to." You have to begin to pay extra attention to them.