Fairborn woman accused of stealing $116,000 from Moraine business

A local woman previously sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for wire fraud has been charged with stealing more than $100,000 while working for The Stone Center of Dayton in Moraine.

Sandy K. Green, 41, of Fairborn, is accused of pilfering about $116,000 from the business by issuing credit card returns to her and her family’s personal credit cards from June until November 2017, according to a criminal complaint filed in Dayton’s U.S. District Court.

Green is scheduled to appear March 27 for a preliminary hearing on one count of wire fraud.

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The owner of the business, Jerry Berkemeyer, declined to speak on the record. Green’s federal public defender did not return a message seeking comment.

Berkemeyer placed a want ad for a bookkeeper and Green started working at The Stone Center of Dayton on May 15, 2017, according to an affidavit written by U.S. Secret Service special agent Jennifer Tron.

In early November 2017, Moraine police contacted the Secret Service to report that Berkemeyer said he was contacted by an investigative analyst with Elavon, the business credit card processor for the business, Tron wrote.

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The affidavit said the family-owned, 15-employee business had four or five people with access to the credit card processing system and that Elavon noticed multiple credit refunds totaling more than $15,000 between Aug. 11 and Nov. 2, 2017.

Elavon discovered refunds to 21 credit card accounts that all belonged to Green or her family members, Tron wrote.

Staff members also learned Green created a fraudulent sales receipt in her son’s name to attempt to make the refunds appear legitimate, according to the affidavit. Credit cards issued to Green’s mother and husband also received refunds, Tron wrote.

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Green, then known as Sandy Waltman, was convicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in late 2006 for a similar scheme against Adelphia Graphics Systems (AGS), a sign company in suburban Philadelphia.

Green defrauded AGS of more than $348,000 by diverting credit card payments by customers to her credit cards during a two-year period, according to a prosecutor’s sentencing memorandum.

The memo said Green also exploited AGS’s trust by writing more than $31,000 in company checks to herself and charging more than $7,100 against the company’s gasoline credit card cards.

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“(Green) used the money that she stole to indulge her gambling habits, and to finance a luxury lifestyle that would ordinarily be beyond her means and that of her husband, a heating and air conditioning installer,” assistant U.S. attorney Patrick Meehan wrote in December 2006. “Waltman fled AGS in August 2005 without explanation when other AGS employees discovered discrepancies in the company’s accounting records.”

Meehan’s memo said that Green lied about her finances and had no explanation for her negative cash flow.

“She has admitted to defrauding multiple former employers without any real consequence to herself or her family in the past,” Meehan wrote. “The defendant just moved on from one bad situation to the next.”

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Meehan quoted an AGS representative who said the $387,000 loss “severely jeopardized the livelihood of our 70 employees.” The representative also said the company had difficulty covering payroll and paying vendors, which “damaged our reputation and delayed the receipt of material and services needed for our manufacturing processes.”

Green pleaded guilty was sentenced in December 2006 to 27 months in federal prison and to pay full restitution to AGS.

Green was released from prison in January 2009, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

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