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Ex-Facebook diversity manager pleads guilty to bilking $4M from company
- kdwikzncba 3y agoRemember folks, real diversity comes from people who look different.
- fwungy 3y agoIf you're a person of color, better yet a woman, you can hire yourself out to front a company. That puts the company at the front of the line for government contracts, as well as contracts funded by government money indirectly. You get 30%! Completely legal.
- sershe 3y agoWhen I hear about a case like this it actually warms my heart. As the 20th century ideological parties/governments/organizations demonstrate, compared to true believers, criminals faking it to enrich themselves are a lesser evil by far!
- DebtDeflation 3y agoCouple of questions: 1) What exactly qualifies someone to be a "Head of Diversity"? She has a BA in Poli Sci and a Masters of Public Administration. No formal training in anything HR related. It seems like every job she's ever held has been the same - Sr Manager/Director/Sr Director of DEI at Viacom, Cox, Nike, Facebook. 2) What exactly does a Head of Diversity do? Other than hire a consultant to develop an Employee Diversity Training course and establish metrics/targets for hiring by diversity category. Seems like you could just hire the consultant directly and then let them go after their month or two of work is done.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago> What exactly does a Head of Diversity do? They embezzle company funds.
- londons_explore 3y agoGot a feeling this is far more widespread than the 1 case the feds found...
- wmf 3y agoThey do multiple corporate embezzlement cases per year. Maybe multiple per month.
- erikpukinskis 3y agoWhat, fraud?
- mc32 3y agoYeah. Rarely does this kind of crime get committed once by a person. Same as the person claiming they only cheated once. Once people make the choice to go over a taboo threshold, they’ll likely do it multiple times.
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago[flagged]
- TriangleEdge 3y agoI suppose psychopathy and machiavellianism are diversity points as well. Should of just done insider trading like the rest of the world leaders. It's harder to prove in court evidently.
- atonse 3y agoWould these count as civil cases or criminal cases? Or is that up to the prosecution?
- mcbits 3y agoBoth. Criminal (brought by the government) for the punishment, civil (brought by the victim) to recover the damages.
- dboreham 3y agoSome bad internal controls there at FB. Presumably one of her mules rated her out.
- bruce511 3y agoLike all sufficiently large organisations, with huge amounts of money, this is less a control problem and more a scale problem. First, we should note that 4 mil, over 4 years, is a rounding error in the meta financial. Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you. Second it's worth noting that spending any amount of money, at scale, is inefficient. Once you get past the stage of "the owner writes all the checks" you need rules, limits and so on. The more the money , the more people spending it. At which point you are hiring people -just- to spend money, and then more people to watch over them, and then even more people to watch over them. So yeah, once you have enough people, you'll inevitable have some that are comfortable fleecing some out. Since preventing that is infinite oversight, it's simpler to just accept that it'll happen as a cost of doing business. On the one hand you can describe this as "bad internal controls". On the other hand, if the controls cost more than the losses then that's "worse". Context matters.
- sokoloff 3y ago> Sure it's a lot to me and you (and her) but its less important to fb than a $1 is to you. That is almost surely wrong, even after taking into account the declining marginal utility of money. FB's net income for 2022 was $23.1B. $1M is 1 part in 23100 for them. $1 for most any SWE in the US is ~4-20x less concentrated when compared by annual income.
- refurb 3y ago”The feds said Furlow-Smiles, who had access to company credit cards and the ability to approve invoices as part of her role at the company” It’s a basic controls issue. Having an employee approve their own submitted invoices violates even the most basic accounting measures.
- plasticbugs 3y agoA former co-worker of mine ran nearly this exact same scheme. As an executive for a cable network, he bilked his company out of 8 million dollars. He invoiced the company for video production work that never happened. $25k here, $20k there. He has since served his time of 4+ years in a New York state prison. He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn. I expect she will do the same and she’ll be back on the market in a few years with her Facebook diversity manager role at the top of her LinkedIn.
- paxys 3y agoGoogle exists, you know.
- plasticbugs 3y agoI was more speaking to the audaciousness of it all. I expect many employers will still do their due diligence and with high profile cases like these it’ll be impossible to hide. So I guess the perpetrator ultimately has to own their actions and maybe including these indiscretions in their LinkedIn is inevitable.
- plasticbugs 3y agoI should add my former co-worker is easily found in Google. He is not a low-profile kind of person. He is best known for owning expensive cars and bankrolling “cannonball run” record attempts.
- tomcam 3y ago> He lists his role at that cable company on his LinkedIn. The kind of detail you wouldn’t put in a movie script because it’s too obviously contrived lol
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoThats why you do background checks when hiring staff. After being caught once, the judgement will show in your record for 7 years. Most employers would be adviaed to steer clear of such fraudulent employees
- ttldr 3y ago@mods -- could we link to the DoJ post linked to in the article? the article doesn't contribute anything new other than superfluous (at best) images and salacious descriptions. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/former-global-diversity-executive-facebook-pleads-guilty-defrauding-company-out-more-4 https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndga/pr/former-global-diversity...
- mikeyouse 3y agoSimilar scandal was just uncovered at the Jacksonville Jags where a mid-level employee used virtual credit cards to steal upwards of $22 million: https://fortune.com/2023/12/07/nfl-jacksonville-jaguars-executive-alleged-theft-22-million/ https://fortune.com/2023/12/07/nfl-jacksonville-jaguars-exec... Looks like he was a gambling addict and used nearly all the money to place bets on super out-of-the-money parlays.
- paulcole 3y agoHe also used part of the money to put down a retainer with a criminal defense firm lol.
- shalmanese 3y agoOne gamble he ultimately won.
- mikeyouse 3y agoI wonder if the lawyers could be in trouble for "receiving stolen goods"-type charges if they accept payment to represent the guy their own firms is defending.
- neilv 3y agoI'd like to know why she did it. I'd hope she already made a good living on Facebook TC. And fraud risked getting caught and hurting not only herself but also the larger social mission.
- everybodyknows 3y agoThe prosecutor had a similar observation: ... defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” US Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said ...
- eviks 3y agoGood, but not great, plus the thrill of it, plus the perception of risk lowers with more successful attempts
- mock-possum 3y agoI could see doing it 'just this once,' for an emergency - but then you get away with it, and next time it's a little less of an emergency - and eventually, it's just "hey I want more money" so poof now more money magically appears for you.
- redder23 3y ago[flagged]
- mock-possum 3y agocare to explain your thinking on that?
- talldatethrow 3y agoThe question is, was this even a person that really believed in the cause, or were they simply there for their benefit and also criminal. I see people sometimes argue this about the Catholic church priests molesting boys.. are they even examples of a believing Catholic? Or just a fraudster trying to get off?
- FireBeyond 3y agoI wouldn't go that far, personally. But... DEI positions do also attract heavily traumatized / toxic people, some of whom seem quite proud of it. In my state alone in recent years I can think of two prominent cases. A Community College near me had a "diversity happy hour event" that invited everyone... except white people. And then when people called that out as not being particularly inclusive, the DEI coordinator doubled down: "If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that." For added irony, the coordinator had taken on a native name and touted her native ancestry. But it was later revealed that she was Caucasian. Another university very near by had had a "Day of Exclusion" planned by DEI groups that basically planned to "exclude white students from school buildings" for the day. In the past, many students (of all races) had stayed away from campus that day in support, or protest. It was unclear though, what would happen if white students did try to enter school buildings (one of the groups websites for the event included the URL fragment "/no-neonazis-allowed". And then there was Rachel Dolezal, who faked being African American and ended up as the leader of the NAACP and a professor of African Studies at EWU, born to white parents and claiming that she "self-identified as black" (though that seems at odds with her lying about her parents race on application forms. Crazily, though, both these people are still in diversity positions. One is a Director of the Diversity program at a California school, and the other holds multiple community and diversity related roles. And then we get to some of the tech crowd and diversity/community/evangelist position people who are openly anti-male, like Randi Harper, running an anti-harassment support organization while setting her Twitter handle things like "Kill All Men", submitting bio pics to conferences with her drinking from a mug with "Male Tears" on the side. Or Adria Richards, Coraline Ehmke, famous for joining open source projects with codes of conduct that were not "aggressive enough" (her own words) and then trying to get contributors kicked out of those projects for things they'd said elsewhere in life. And then losing her shit when people pointed out the numerous times she'd advocated for violence elsewhere in life, until GitHub, who had hired her for "Community Safety" had to fire her for obvious hypocrisy. There are people who are working (not just in tech) in DEI to restore some balance (because there absolutely are areas that are profoundly sexist, racist, and so on) whose laudable work is being undershadowed by people who obviously have unresolved issues in their personal life or in their mental health who see working in DEI as some form of ... therapy or catharsis for them.
- anon-sre-srm 3y agoCorporate DEI is a fad of ostentatious pseudo-sympathy. It's a jobs program for even more bullshit jobs. But one should know they're on the Titanic when there is lots of diversity of the 5 other people in the building who aren't doing anything constructive but are socializing loudly for hours at work with no apparent hustle or purpose. Meta is spending over $22 billion on servers in 2023 and again in 2024 without a specific product strategy or need. Build it and depreciation will come. Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops.
- zonkerdonker 3y agoA bit hard to show someone the door who has more than 50% of the shares vote from dual class shares. He can only be booted if he votes himself out as CEO.
- latency-guy2 3y ago> It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. As long as Zuckerberg prints money, I do not care what he burns up as part of the thousands of experiments being run at his company every day. Similar to Musk, these two have made me multiple millions with no effort expended on my behalf. META +168% YTD
- redsparrow 3y ago> Face it, Zuck is an accidental billionaire who had the advantages of Harvard but is now completely out of his depth and lacks a crystalized vision as to where to go from here. It won't be long before Zuck is shown the door after losing large piles of money and failing to make more of it. I give him 1 year or 2 tops. I'm pretty sure people have been saying exactly that for 15 years now. Maybe someday it will come true...
- throwawayYC2025 3y agoMost managers are pointless at large companies, but a diversity manager is one of those signs that your company has reached a new level of bureaucracy.
- kdwikzncba 3y agoI hear you like downvotes.
- xenospn 3y ago“This week on: American Greed”
- kdwikzncba 3y agoWhat a stupid comment. Greed is universal, it's not especially American. Furthermore America is one of those countries where you can steal millions and still end up in jail. In many countries a few million is enough to avoid jail forever.
- zephrx1111 3y agoDEI is a such big industry that, the practitioners are starting corruption. It also usually correlates to the sunset of the industry.
- somedude895 3y agoDEI in itself is a corrupt scheme to begin with. The related fields in academia work only towards justifying their own existence, their salaries and positions, by finding proof for their beliefs. Their activism and claims like the one that „diverse teams perform better“ then allow them to move their peers holding useless degrees into made up positions of power in business.
- kdwikzncba 3y agoIt's corrupt because it's pointless. It's easier to defraud by delivering nothing, when the thing you are supposed to deliver is already nothing.