Huge fraud and theft scheme against a small local business

"In 2015, immediately after they were forced to sell their Maryland home because they were drowning in debt, Mona and Jay Freedman discovered an awful truth. Their companies, the ones they built from scratch, the ones that provided them with all their income, had fallen victim to a huge fraud/theft scheme, eventually totaling more than half a million dollars. Their bookkeeper and trusted right hand, a middle-aged married
mother of four, perpetrated a labyrinth scheme during a nine-year period. She drove Mona and Jay to the edge of financial ruin".

This quote is taken from the back cover of a book we wrote called A Snake in the Office: Nine Years of Trust, Betrayal and Embezzlement of Half a Million Dollars. About five years after she went to jail and and with a lot of emotion, honesty, and a little embarrassment all mixed together, we wrote a book about our experiences. This book takes the reader into our family’s small business nightmare. We describe in detail the crimes and how she avoided detection for nine years, how to prevent it from happening to you, and how to detect theft and fraud right now in your small business.

We know, it might be tough to read or listen to this story and not think, “How did they not know? It wouldn’t have happened to me. Would it? I know better, and I’m not usually a trusting person. Someone was asleep at the wheel, right?” When we look back on it, when we tell the story now, we wonder about it ourselves. But trust is exactly what happened. Not overnight, but trust developed throughout years of cordial business relationships, working side by side seemingly toward the same goals. Trust was cultivated, along with clever cover-ups, tricks, lies, deceit, theft, greed, and ultimately betrayal. And felonies, lots of felonies.

Amazingly, Stella sat only six feet away from us, stealing our money, our future, and our dignity almost every day for nearly nine years. During the course of the investigation and beyond, many people have asked us, “How can that happen? It’s almost unimaginable that your bookkeeper, who was seemingly honest and devoted to you, could do something like that over such a long period.”

We have since heard many theft and fraud stories including those who hired family members or close friends who stole from them. Few of these accounts have been published, making our story pretty unique. Many stories go unreported due to a variety of circumstances: embarrassment of the victims, their families, or a need to not publicize a theft or fraud case in the hopes of avoiding negative attention. In our research for this book, we found multiple fraud schemes regarding multi-million dollar thefts from large businesses and organizations. Those numbers are often staggering, but our story is important, too. A Snake in the Office is a lesson for small mom-and-pop businesses, emerging or struggling businesses and entrepreneurs that use personal funding for growth. They could lose their life savings and easily fall into the “Trust Trap” like we did.

After all, this is the wildest story we have ever heard, and it happened to us.

Mona originally considered writing a book while she was taking notes for herself during the initial criminal investigation, shortly after we fired our bookkeeper Stella Hardin for stealing money from our businesses. This was well before we knew the full extent of her crimes. We were sure that we were not the only folks to have gone through something like this. As it unfolded, the evidence suggested that this case was unusual because of the length of time she was stealing from us and the amount of money involved, especially from such small companies.

Writing this book served two goals for Mona. First, she loved the idea of warning the public and possibly saving someone else from experiencing what happened to us. Second, writing her thoughts down helped ease what she feared might be some type of stress disorder. She never understood how being a victim of a crime like this affects someone so deeply until it happened to us. Telling our story also helped Mona cope with the grief and feelings of loss. We worked so hard to keep our companies afloat, all while Stella was taking advantage of us. We felt we were denied years of benefit from working that hard, and the sense of accomplishment that goes along with that.

Unlike Mona, Jay didn’t seriously contemplate writing a book about this episode in our lives until she insisted upon it. She started the first draft on her own and recounted the story from her emotionally-charged perspective. Jay's focus was on the huge task of orchestrating the collection of the evidence necessary to present to the authorities. In the aftermath of our discovery, we were both still running the companies, collecting evidence, training new personnel, and dealing with a confluence of personal challenges.

But eventually, Jay saw the wisdom of helping tell our story in print, both because of the therapeutic benefits of writing everything out, as well as the benefit of relating a cautionary tale for the public good. As such, the story received wide news coverage on regional television, newspapers and online. A wide circle of relatives, friends, business clients and acquaintances, as well as members of the general public, expressed a desire to know all the details and facts of our true crime story. And it just so happened to involve someone they knew.

Each of us experienced, reacted to, and dealt with the trauma in our own and sometimes different ways.
We hope our story is an entertaining read, that it enables people to learn from our mistakes, and that it educates people on how to prevent this from happening to them. The book contains some thought-provoking advice by us and by experts in the field of business and criminal fraud investigation. The Appendices offer tips and advice on how to prevent small business fraud and embezzlement from happening. Many of the tell-tale signs could have been identified by us if we had access to this information at the time. Contact mona@caringcommunities.org for more information or https://asnakeintheoffice.com.