He would have gotten away with it if it weren't for the HR exec seeing a red flag. Makes you wonder how many other frauds are never discovered.
One other thing: These types of face-to-face, "close on a handshake" negotiations are really open to various types of fraud. I was thinking about this when listening to a friend discussing how he had negotiated a $12,000 discount for his child's base college tuition, by talking over the phone with someone in the college admissions office. Or a commercial real-estate deal that I participated in some years ago that involved several rounds of negotiation. If one or both sides of these transactions wanted to extract some financial benefit "on the side," it would be so easy to do it ... which leads me to believe it happens all the time, anti-fraud laws and signed declarations be damned.
A guy I used to work with was fired for these types of bribes.
This was like 20 years ago when I was just a 17 year old lowly tech IT nerd.
They fired the guy and he was the entire IT guru for an office of about 120 people so I was flown down to Florida to try to size up what was happening.
He went against corporate policy and was buying from and off-brand computer vendor because he was receiving bribes. He magically had two jet skiis one day and the company sort of put two and two together.
It was a nightmare though... no one had the network passwords to the Netware server so I had to copy ALL the data to another box and then migrate everyone over to Windows NT... It was like 150GB of data back when a large HDD was 150MB...
I think we had to split it up across multiple RAID arrays or something crazy.
I have similar examples in my experience. If you run operations it is something you need to watch out for because, in my experience, every vendor extends feelers to see if this is a possibility. It goes unnoticed by accounts receivable because the vendor marks the price up with the 'extra' so they see an invoice, and pay it and get the equipment, none the wiser that is some % higher than it "could" be. This is amplified by vendors of IT gear that quote a "high" MSRP, and then offer a big discount. So the vendor has rack switches for $4500 MSRP they are selling you for $3000 when the 'standard' discount would be $2500 (45 points off list). The accountant sees the 33% off list so they are happy, the vendor gets more than they need to make their margin, and the IT guy on the inside manages to pocket a few thousand that arrives via a side channel.
Everyone gets a little something and everyone is happy as a clam. It is fairly insidious and difficult to combat unless you can pit distributors against each other or vendors in order to force out what their real bottom line is.
This cancer has been finding its way into academic purchasing offices. Researchers could use procurement cards to buy what they needed with their grant money, now administrators are chipping away at this to force people to use shopping portals that directly enable this. It almost never saves money, and the extra time and delays associated with it probably cost money overall, yet its of critical importance to purchasing admins that everyone use this nonsense so they can get their kickbacks.
Now I wish we had a f*'ed company like site for sharing these stories. As @ilamount suggests, it may be way more common than anyone would guess.
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Early 90s, I was the computer kid for a very fast growing retail architecture group within a publicly traded company. Dept grew from 24 to 130 people during my time (just under 2 years).
I was the scape goat for a failed budget & estimating tool.
The shark in the national construction management role hired some goofy consultancy. The shark fired me when his consultants missed their big deadline. I was told that my failure delayed store openings and contributed to the company missing their projected earnings, causing the stock price to decline.
Sure.
That same shark was later busted for kickbacks from vendors, expensing family vacations, and so forth. His crimes were never disclosed. Probably signed an NDA and got severance package. Of course, I never got an apology.
The sad part was that I had already created and deployed a nifty little budget & estimating tool during my spare time. The architects loved it. But I don't know how to manage upwards, so the hierarchy didn't understand the work had already been done. Maybe because my tool was "too simple", compared to the alternatives under consideration (eg integrating MicroStation with Primavera).
My bigger mistake was being honest with the shark. He asked what I thought of his consultants, without telling me he had already hired them. I said something like "They're frauds. Any work they do for us will end up as lawsuits and tears." So the shark probably started engineering the blame shifting at that point.
It is a common form of corporate fraud this was mentioned when few years back I did a "serious" course on Hr/Ir issues - serious as it will end up in court.
One of the main take always was one of the main roles was to baby sit a manager (with the hr person) if one of his team was being investigated, to make shure they didn't do anything silly like resign
>He magically had two jet skiis one day and the company sort of put two and two together.
Despite there being fraud in this case, there's something slightly disturbing about your employer analyzing the way you spend your money and assuming fraud...
It doesn't sound like his plan to repay the $9 million up-front payment over time according to the original payment schedule is likely to have worked.
Now, if he'd restrained himself to the $4.4 million that no one actually knew about, then it really would have come down to an observant HR exec. But, of course, the kind of guy who pulls a scam like that probably doesn't know how to restraint himself.
Yup, his scheme had plenty of pitfalls, obviously. Which is why people didn't really buy the notion that he was going to pay restitution down the road.
Really, the only thing which could explain how someone could come up with something like that is pure complacency and foolish, short-term greed. Reality has a way of catching up with these games; it's not something anyone would want to get involved in otherwise.
I've also heard that a significant amount of the detected fraudsters are simply let go. Essentially, a company would rather ask the current CFO to leave about learning the information rather than admit it had a CFO who was able to steal millions.
I spent a few years living near a nationally well known American university with very tight housing. And we had to pay `finder's fee` to apartment managers for the privilege of applying for a rental to the tune of a grand or so. Like 20+ years ago.
So, yah much there's much white collar crime going on, from a grand at a time to a few millions. I'm not surprised.
Most of the fraud that is commitment with parties on both side of the transaction is for practical purposes undetectable and unprovable, no matter the resources available to parties investigating the fraud.
The only break you get is when one of the parties makes a mistake like using company networks to conspire or sours on the deal and rats everyone out. Then you get to roll them all up.
Also, using cut outs like family members or trusts create reasonable cause for doubt unless their is overwhelming evidence that the arrangement was fraudulent, no matter how obvious it seems on the face of it.
Especially at banks. Very embarrassing and not worth the attention it would garner if they pressed charges. There are a lot of financial institution that have very weak controls. I've seen it first hand.
Anecdote from third world country here. Friend works in 'IT security company', told me banks are the worst here.
One bank had guys in the IT department work for a couple of months then quit, one after the other, apparetly after having stolen 'enough' money (whatever that means to a thief). Rinse and repeat, till their company got called in.
That bank's systems were apparently that bad.
I always wondered whether it was that the bank had no proof of the theft or an image thing where they could not afford to go after them because customers would lose confidence in them.
I once worked for a bank and I recall they had a policy not to bother chasing after any fraud below a (surprisingly high to me) dollar figure, except if it was suspected that an employee was involved. If there was suspicion that an employee was involved, then they would go all out even for the smallest amount.
In a criminal context in the US, you have a constitutional right to legal representation. I suspect Canada is the same, but I don't know for sure. In any case, this isn't a viable solution, even if it were a good idea, which I'm skeptical of.
It appears he prepared fake K-1s for his investment "partners" so he was filing tax returns for his "investment" company. Based on this, he likely reported those payments as capital invested in the partnership, not income.
From a U.S. perspective, I question the categorical statement about 'legality.' See, e.g., Operation Varsity Blues.[1]. Maybe 'commonplace', but unless the folks involved have happily run it past their GCs and the local U.S. Attorney, don't get ahead of yourself there...
The craziest thing about this is that if Jeff didn't conduct all his (illegal) business on his work laptop, he may never have been caught. And, the only reason HR decided to look at his laptop was to find "a copy of a commission structure to build out the corporate sales team" that Jeff was supposed to leave behind before he left for another job.
yes, exactly. he covered his tracks pretty well otherwise, but he apparently lacked a fundamental understanding of how corporate computing assets are managed.
it's good that he was caught and punished, especially since white-collar crimes are relatively under-prosecuted. i'm more mixed about the severity of punishment--restitution plus 7 years in prison. on one hand, it seems fair relative to the sentence lengths of other crimes, but prison terms seem onerous and overly-punitive overall to me.
I steal a watch, it gets returned, I go to jail. That's more or less been the story since written law. This guy steals 13 million dollars, it gets returned, and you say he shouldn't go to jail?
Sure jail for a day or few maybe. Would cause tremendous discomfort and embarrassment IMO. But years?? For either of these crimes, sounds crazy. I see jails as a way to remove people who could be violent out of society while they can receive sober reflection, counselling, etc. But to toss around an arbitrary number of years for nonviolent offences sounds vindictive and terrifying.
In my opinion some of the punishments used in antiquity were far more rational than those of today. Prison as a punishment did not exist, because anyone would have considered it stupid to pay money for housing & feeding a felon.
For theft and other forms of damage that are not irreversible, the deterrence was achieved not by threatening with prison, but by forcing the guilty person to pay a multiple of the value of the stolen goods or of the damages.
The multiplying factor varied from country to country. Where laws were less severe, a thief had to pay double or maybe quadruple, but where laws were more severe a thief had to pay ten times the value of what he had stolen.
So even today this would be a better punishment. Nobody has any advantage if someone who has stolen 10 million goes to jail, but if he had to pay back at least 20 million, then that would be real deterrence.
In antiquity, those who could not pay back the required amounts risked to become slaves, a method which would not be applicable today. Nevertheless, in the present society where it is almost impossible to hide, it should be easier to enforce payment without such extremes.
Potential criminals may be terrified, but that's because they're thinking straight. Some stupid kid about to commit the crime that sends him to prison and ruins his entire life, is thinking about $200 for some more meth. As a deterrent, it just doesn't work.
Well, maybe it works, but nobody hears about crimes that were not done because people were scared of the consequences.
Just to be clear - I ma not a fan of how democracy like US manages their prisons, prisoners, and folks after prison - yes its kind of a death sentence for any serious job, it doesn't matter much if you would be a stellar citizen and employee afterwards for rest of your life. Clearly pure punishment and no correction, 3rd world medieval style. But that's another topic.
Kids that do stupid things for meth should get a) treatment for addiction and b) be removed from society until deemed worthy of coming back. In some place, like, dunno, lighter prison err correction facility (depending on the crime committed)
Good luck parking a car on the street if you'd be able to commit gta and get off with an apology and a class you zone out in. It should feel terrifying to commit a crime and the law should behave vindictively. What good is the social contract otherwise?
But it doesn't work! If it worked, there would be no theft. Clearly prison is seen as a minor deterrent, is of obviously no use regarding actual rehabilitation... and is very, very expensive.
yes, some jail is warranted, but the magnitudes of the crimes make a difference. a few days for a watch. a couple years maybe (what the defense had hoped for) for millions of dollars, because that represents stealing a few dozen person-years of economic output (not to mention the non-monetary aspects).
I rolled that around in my brain for a decade and eventually decided people who commit financial crimes need to have a day in prison tacked onto their sentence for every $1000 they steal. Under that scheme Jeff Davis dies in prison. And that shouldn't be anything we should care about.
Regarding the seven years. He'll probably do less than seven. The federal system has no parole but has exemplary behavior and then he can also get supervised release toward the end of his sentence. I'm of a mixed mind on how severe white-collar crime sentences should be (and how to vary/judge them), however that seems quite fair (if not light) when combined with restitution. It's a very sizable fraud.
I was under the impression that you must serve at least 90% of your time sentenced in federal prison, and that's with good behavior. The real variable is whether you're put in minimum security prison. That's the tier where there are nicer facilities and no fences. You can literally walk "off campus"--at least if you don't mind surely getting caught and sent to a high-security prison afterwards.
Yeah, I don't understand what the plan was for 20 years from now when the contract gets renegotiated. Maybe he figured corporate amnesia would have set in.
Still, it seems like there are easier ways to make more money. eg if you're a really good salesperson, there are plenty of companies -- mine included -- that will happily double or triple that $360k/year.
That's the stupidest thing. He would have been busted for sure, but there is no reason he couldn't have reduced the "Upfront" money he took by $500,000 to begin with.
If everything had matched up perfectly at the end, there is little reason for anyone to ever look into anything.
He also maybe have parked the stolen money in an offshore account for a few years, and not gone crazy shopping before he even left that job.
Like seriously, do none of his coworkers who know how much he makes wonder about the size of his mansions?
500,000, later 1,000,000, per year. See the table in the article: the overall sum of the contract didn't change, he asked for 9 million to be paid earlier than initially planned. They'd somehow have to reappear entirely later for everything to look clean.
Reading this I couldn’t help marveling at how poorly constructed the incentive structure must have been. This guy was basically leaving millions of dollars on the table until he realized he could take the money for himself.
How badly was his commission compensation setup so that he would turn to a life of crime rather than close the extra millions and cash the commission check?
The end of the article where David is the pauper despite making half a million a year hit home. Perspectives get so warped around wealth. I once worked with a guy making $500k/year despite relatively low skills and education because he was in the right place at the right time on Wall Street. But he fell in with a social crowd of people with true wealth and his ego turned out to be a dark monster. The guy ended up spending half a decade in prison after stealing millions to try and keep up appearances with that crowd.
With the death of Deadspin and the hollowing out of Sports Illustrated over the last month or so, they are one of the few remaining places that will do this type of in depth sports reporting. However I will point out the target of this piece is not a league, team, player, or anyone that ESPN would have to be afraid of pissing off.
You're right about this, of course, but ESPN has stuff of this quality on a pretty darn slow drip given the talent they have and the even greater talent they could afford if they decided to make quality investigative / long form stuff a real priority.
I suspect the fact that they do it at all is that it's some enlightened manager's little feifdom that they protect and that it'll be gone as soon as that person finds another gig or retires. I doubt that dyed-in-the-wool corporate types are in love with these operations, as sad as it is.
In depth investigations like this are released by ESPN once, sometimes twice a month. Sorta rare, but they do still do some good journalism on occasion.
The number of people involved in the authentication would have to exceed the other party's ability to bribe them. Corrupt practices could extend to both companies involved in a deal.
What would have happened to him had he had qualms of conscience before he was caught?
If he'd owned up and paid the money back he'd probably have just gotten a lighter sentence.
I'm always surprised by people's willingness to leave so much personal information on a work computer. In this case actually leaving the breadcrumbs there.
The obliviousness of what was facing him after learning the FBI was on to him is mind blowing. He thought he could pay it all back and be fine? His wife sticking by him this whole time is also amazing to me. Why? He's a crook. He's ruined her and their children's life. He doesn't deserve them.
Just FYI, that aphorism does not apply in this case. That is, unless David is a blood relative of his wife, in which case I guess he's got other problems...
"Bonds forged of blood are thicker than the waters of the womb" is the original, I believe. And it basically meant that people you fought besides were closer than literal family.
Not exactly the meaning of the modern version, though.
Its hard for me to understand how someone could accept any explanation for being able to purchase a $8.8m house on a "low 6 figures" salary. To me thats the most idiotic thing - the guy just flat out SPENT the money, all likely in one sum.
I used to work in retail and one of the managers ended up stealing about $350,000 cash from the store. Her partner worked at the same store and claimed that he didn't know anything about the situation but I just don't know how a spouse could have that much extra money, multiple years of their salaries and not realise that either this person is amazing with finances or something fishy is going on.
Did you read the article? He bought properties for investment (and a home for him I guess). The Kings got back more money than he stole, even with discounting at the risk-free rate.
I worked at a company where the receptionist was married to one of two salesmen. She was feeding her husband leads, depriving the other guy. They were both 19 or 20, and he bought a brand-new Porsche, which maybe should have been a clue... but they were cute, naive (hah, so we thought), Mormon kids -- who would suspect them? Eventually, they got greedy and started scumming the other guy's accounts. When one of those accounts was a personal friend of the original salesman, it all blew up.
Personally, I see no reason to assume the wife didn't know. Presumption of innocence is the duty of our courts. And fwiw, I don't presume she's guilty, either.
Would you care to provide an estimate as to what percentage of people with $1+ million net worths are criminals? Order of magnitude is fine. 30%? 3%? 0.3%? 0.03%?
$1M net worth in many areas is effectively someone who bought a house 40 years ago and paid off the mortgage. A million bucks ain't what it used to be.
In the U.S., the incarceration rate is about 0.7%. So as a point of fact it seems likely that dentists do not outnumber criminals. :) They do probably outnumber white collar/big money criminals though.
Can you rephrase this in terms of a positive claim about reality which is rigorous enough to be falsifiable? I'll falsify it for you.
We are bullshitting about the incidence of criminality among the wealthy out of some crabs-pulling-down-crabs-leaving-the-bucket class warfare. This is not instrumentally useful on HN; many HNers will find themselves wealthy, some sooner and some later, and others should not self-limit on their chances of ending up there by adopting discourses which suggest that wealth is necessarily stolen.
Come again? You do realize you don’t have to be wealthy to leave something behind to your children. It could be something as simple as the house or car you had before dying.
I really don’t understand why there’s so much disdain for something every parent aspires to do for their children. Such jaded and cynical types here, sheesh.
I think poster was recognizing the differences between those that start off life with enough to fully fund a reasonable life without effort vs. those that do not.
Agree. The unspoken tenet in my family has always been you enjoy enormous advantage; your responsibility is to leave the next generation better off than where you started.
The nerve of people wanting their life's contribution to be a net positive for those they love dearly....
Wealth continues to concentrate upwards, and if you can’t easily find information on your own, I’d be happy to provide sources that show that social mobility is low, and a good predictor of your class is that of your parents. Please don’t set up this straw man. There’s nothing wrong with leaving things to your kids, but maybe you don’t need $50 billion to be distributed to three or four individuals.
That's characteristic of 'Long-Form Journalism', which you're right is becoming more common lately.
Another common characteristic that can be annoying with Long-Form Journalism is the way it often jumps around, focusing on the subject at hand for a paragraph, then jumping off into some background context/flavor meanderings for a while before returning again to the core topic.
I kinda enjoy it for what it is, when I have time, but it's a very different thing from 'real news'. More of a reflective, long-term digest piece and I think that's a reflection of where that style came from (think National Geographic more than Daily Telegraph).
If you can't make it past the first three paragraphs before making an assessment of this well researched piece perhaps you need to evaluate how much time YOU have. It's a feature article not an AP wire report.
I wouldn't say I "can't", nor do I believe my distaste for this form of writing indicates I should evaluate anything about my use of time.
Frankly that along with the caps "YOU" comes off a bit hostile, but I see you are a writer so maybe it came of as a personal attack of sorts. Apologies if so.
I see these type of articles as ultimately doomed to fail because the audience they are after likely isn't the curl up by the fire with a novel while wearing a faded beige cardigan that smells of tea and old book set. Plus they are really annoying when I'm trying to obtain information.
It's not just time. More attention and working memory. These types of articles abuse it for very little gain. They are like Christian rock. Not good rock. Not very Christian.
This is an entirely different topic from how well researched the article is.
Consider this an opinion piece rather than a news comment.
Somewhere in between this and parent article (but leaning more to this) would be perfect. A little detail is good but these text walls of "A tall slim man he stood in the shade of a very old tree that was greener then an emerald as he took a drag on his cigarette and told me he had known Bob since childhood" get old fast.
Am I the only one that doesn't want a screenplay to read about a sequence of events? Or thinks that type of stuff is becoming far too common lately?
Right? I DO have interest in a higher level of detail - how was this uncovered, etc - but the whole article was painful to parse. I also had to keep remembering that "Jeff" and "David" were the same person.
Yeah, that bugged me, too. No reason why the author couldn't have been consistent about whether to use the first or last name there. Or at the very least used "Mr. David" instead of just "David" to make it clear that no, this ain't some other guy named "David". It's okay if it's clearly a first name, but when it's ambiguous like that it's confusing.
It depends if the goal is mostly to inform or entertain me. For some investigative-type articles about a foreign culture/environment, it can be enjoyable. For news reporting, it's a nuisance.
"Today he drove in from his new mansion on Beach Ave designed by noted architect Willem Van Vondenberg and CHECK OUT THAT SLAM DUNK! Let's see it on the replay again and again and again."
I too admit I'd like to see a CliffsNotes summary of the trick he pulled off rather than read through a long story-esque narrative. Maybe I'll form "ADHDreadersClub.com" as a startup. I have at least 2 customers here.
I learned about "Bottom Line Up Front"¹ via an article that popped up here on HN a few weeks (?) ago². I've since made a concerted effort to apply that strategy to all my writing³, and I believe those writing news stories ought to do the same.
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¹: For those unfamiliar with BLUF, in short: start with the main point, then layer on further explanation. BLUF's a military term, but it's pretty similar in concept and purpose to writing an abstract in an academic paper, or the SYNOPSIS section of a manpage.
I’ve seen that obsessed accountant type, and I’ve been that obsessed accountant perusing public filings
There are lots of discrepancies that dont really need the fireworks
Self dealing, contracts awarded, etc
If they get paid its fine.
Jeff David should have been prosecuted in 2026 on event of non-payment from his unraveled scheme. If everyone felt they were made whole but noticed the external entities then it should have just garnered a slow upward headnod from the current executives saying “What a G, my G, ya feel”
I can't tell if you're trolling or not. But if not, this is a terrible way to think: It's okay to steal and gamble with someone else's money as long as you become rich enough to pay it back? Only if you lose more money than you steal do you belong in jail? Chances are that you will make money over time since the economy grows over time. But only wealthy white collar people should get this opportunity to make interest off money that isn't theirs, right?
It is commonplace and yes transfers of money and property done in “white collar“ ways have less harsh consequences and I no longer have any opinion on that
My only point is that this is a misuse of public resources
I found what you're saying a bit hard to parse but it seems to amount to 'this kind of activity should be allowed'.
Can't agree with that. If anything, white-collar fraud like this is under-prosecuted, and more effort should be put towards preventing and detecting it.
One other thing: These types of face-to-face, "close on a handshake" negotiations are really open to various types of fraud. I was thinking about this when listening to a friend discussing how he had negotiated a $12,000 discount for his child's base college tuition, by talking over the phone with someone in the college admissions office. Or a commercial real-estate deal that I participated in some years ago that involved several rounds of negotiation. If one or both sides of these transactions wanted to extract some financial benefit "on the side," it would be so easy to do it ... which leads me to believe it happens all the time, anti-fraud laws and signed declarations be damned.