Earmark Media Presents: Oh My Fraud

Hello, Accounting Friends! We have a special bonus episode for you today from our sister podcast, Oh My Fraud. In this episode, hosts Caleb Newquist and Greg Kite speak with Nathan Mueller. As a young person, Nathan was hyper-focused on wanting to make money, which led him to perpetuate an eight million dollar embezzlement scheme in the mid-2000s. Caleb and Greg questioned Nathan about the fraud, his time in prison, and his new job now as an accountant. The hosts don't hold back getting into the nitty-gritty details of Nathan's story, and there is some strong language used, so be warned. If that's not your cup of tea, I recommend you skip this episode. And if you decide to listen, anyway, send your mail to Oh My Fraud at earmarkcpe.com. If you enjoy hearing incredible firsthand accounts of white collar crime, you can find more episodes like this from Oh My Fraud, wherever you listen to podcasts, just search for Oh My Fraud or click the link in the show notes to subscribe. All right, let's get to it. Here is the Oh My Fraud podcast and their uncensored interview with convicted fraudster turned accountant, Nathan Mueller. Enjoy! So easy. And now on to the episode. Hello and welcome to Oh My Fraud, a true crime podcast where our criminals cut checks instead of next, I'm Greg Kite. And I'm Caleb Newquist. Uh, Greg, I am excited for this episode today. You know why? Why is that Caleb Newquist? Well, for starters, we are doing a follow-up episode from an earlier episode, episode four, uh, which is entitled with great check writing power comes great responsibility. Yep. And it is worth the, our episode is an interview of the perpetrator of that fraud. That's why I'm excited. Are you excited? Yes, we interviewed Nathan Mueller. The dude stole over $8 million from insurance giant, ING in the early 2000s, and which is one of my favorite fraud cases ever. And, uh, I've done tons of webinars and live CP events where I've references fraud. So I kept thinking that I was like, like I'm Nathan Mueller's biggest fan, but it's weird to be a fan of a guy who committed a crime. But I know, but listen, I know a hell a lot of a lot more about Nathan Mueller than I do about like Adele or Tom Segura, and I am fans of them. So it's a weird, weird place to be. So let me ask you, what is it about this fraud that makes it one of your favorites? Honestly, I think one of the big things that makes it one of my favorites is that the first account that I ever read of this fraud was Nathan Mueller's own account of it. So the fact that we got some inside baseball on it, but then it's also just fun as we'll see with the interview, we get, we get into it. There's some, there's some weird turns and twists that happen. As this fraud continues, some close calls that he had that were just delightful for those of us who weren't committing the fraud, but probably the exact opposite for Nathan while he was in the thick of it. Yeah. I mean, I had this ended up being a great conversation. I didn't know what to expect. I am not a fanboy on the level that you are. I'm not even a fanboy. I am a fan of this case. I thought it was a good story, but then to able to like get the guy and sit him down and just hear him out was thoroughly enjoyable and I learned a lot. And of course, we'll talk about all that stuff at the end, but I feel like you've got your fanboy energy. It's the right level of fanboy energy. That's what I'm saying to you. Oh, good. Yeah. I was encouraging him to do more fraud. Like when's your next go? I'm drop Nathan. Yeah, it's like, is it time for a comeback? Because that wouldn't want him to leave with feeling that. He's like, oh, maybe the same kind of thing. I think you got it in it. I think you got it in your Nathan. Yeah. Anyway, well, having said all that, let's get into our conversation with Nathan Muller. Nathan, again, so glad to have you on the podcast just to let you just to give you a little more context than the emails that we sent back and forth. I don't know if it's right to say this, but I'm kind of like a super fan of you because I way back in it was, I think it was in 2014. There was an article in the Journal of Accountancy where the majority of the article was first person. I assume you wrote that and you submit it and then they put kind of some commentary around that. Is that right? Yeah. So I wrote that from prison. Oh, and so that was me and Mark the Greeny going back and forth via our email system at the time and through the mail, writing, editing, getting feedback from the Journal of Accountancy on how to do that. So yeah, I was that it was an interesting endeavor to do prison email is like the email we had in like the 90s where straight text, you know, I had 15 minutes at a time to be on each, each minute on email cost me 15 cents. So it was right down my notes and blast through it on email and get it back to him and get it submitted. So I was probably not your standard article writing procedure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's maybe a little easier than like using your one phone call to just crawl into the and say, turn, scribe this real quick. Well, we got one shot. Let's go. Well, we'll get enough to, I mean, and I guess just to give the listeners a little bit context as well. So you were you were convicted of a fraud. You stole a little bit over $8 million from the insurance company, AIG. So far so good. I NG Greg. I NG. I NG. What did I say? I I I scare everything up all. So just to prepare you, just to prepare you, Nathan, a little bit, a regular theme of this podcast is Greg saying things and me correcting him. So look forward to that. Yeah. Yeah. I'll read numbers and even though they're correct in my notes, I'll say them wrong. That's that's the sort of brain damage. I'm going to blame it on COVID. But let's lead and that happened between, if I remember right, like 2004 and 2007 is when when the fraud was happening, right? Yeah. So the there is basically like the phase one, which I call, which was $83,000. I stole over the summer of of 2003. I stopped for about since mobs went back in in March of of four for phase two. And that went on until so from April of 04 until September of 07. Okay. Got you. Now just just again, I mean, part of the story that I don't know tell us kind of your like your life journey getting how old were you when when all that was going down approximately? Um, I started the fraud when I was 29. Okay. So I had been in that position or in that not position, but in that company for six years at that point. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a brand new situation. It was years of growth within a, within a small department, within a big company with a lot of knowledge and experience across the board, you know, how things worked, how are audits words, how my boss has checked my words, you know, I had I had a good understanding of offense work there when I decided to go down that. Right. Got you. Well, tell me kind of growing up like where we did, did you grow up in Minnesota? What was what was growing up like? What was your family situation like? What did you study in college? Stuff like that kind of give us the the the pre fraud resume for Nathan Muller. So I grew up in a small town like 3,000 people. South Central Minnesota. I looked back at my childhood and think, okay, you know, I had a I had a loving supportive family in that small town, you know, stun roughly and I got good grades. I was popular. I had always positivity in my life, but I wasn't happy, you know, even, you know, as a as a teenager, I was not happy. And so I think what I what I thought at the time was, well, I have a great family at New Orleans school and popular at New Orleans sports. I have always positivity. What do I have? And it was money, you know, our family didn't have a lot of money. And so I saw how pleased a lot of importance on, you know, is money the thing that's going to make me happy? Is it going to be the thing that makes, you know, it makes my life fulfilling? Is it going to be the thing that that makes people view me as successful? And I think that that's kind of the road I took. So when I looked at college, I went into accounting because in my small town, there was two CPAs. They drove nice cars. They had nice homes. They had this financial success, respect within the community and stability that I that I wanted, you know, that and so I took an accounting class in high school. I decided, I'm going to be an accountant. So I majored in accounting. I went to college, just right down the road from my hometown, 10 miles away. Good school, you know, they they wanted me to play football there. They had a good accounting program. But for me, college was like, it was a shortcut. It was my goal was get a degree and get a job because I need to start making money, you know, that was always my goal was the money. And so I didn't go to college and experience college. I didn't go to college and, you know, make a ton of friends. I didn't. I didn't go to college, didn't like get an education. I went there to get a degree to get a job. And that's what I did. And so what college it ended up being for me was, you know, I didn't focus on the right things. I focus on getting through as quickly as possible. So I finished three and a half years, but I had an average GPA. And in the accounting world, as you guys probably know, when you finish, you want to get a job with one of those big firms, when you come to campus to interview, they're not talking to people with a, you know, two seven GPA to talking to people with a three five and higher. So I'd limited myself from those jobs from the start. And so, you know, my career started with a a lower level internship that, you know, I literally worked for a CPA as a wife and his daughter in a small, you know, firm. And it was, you know, part of it was just my eagerness to get through school and not really caring about how it did. The other thing was I just didn't know, you know, I was very naive to the accounting world in every way, which included hiring and how to get a job with it, you know, at the places you actually want to work. So, yeah, I have to say, if I may, a lot of what you describe, I personally can resonate, it personally resonates with me because I also grew up in a very small town in the, in flyover country. And my family did not have a lot of money. But I had a friend whose dad was a CPA and like, they had a great house and like, all the things you described, they had a great boat, like all this stuff. And I also was kind of like, again, loving family, a lot of support. I was not popular. I was not good at sports. So the sports part could not have resonated with you. You got no providing strengths. No, it's not a, it's not a perfect image, Greg. It's not a perfect mirror image. But there's a lot of what, all I'm saying is a lot of what you say, Nathan, I, I can personally relate to you because accounting did, what I understood was that the kind of the economic mobility that accounting could provide to me, that part was like clear to me. And I got to take accounting classes in high school. I took my first classes in high school. And so my mind was made up that that's what I was going to pursue. Again, college, I actually, you know, I did have a college experience. I drank my face off. So like, it got a little out of hand. But so it doesn't quite track your college experience. But like in terms of like upbringing and deciding on accounting, that all of that rings very true and very close to my even my own experience. Yes. So, so moving forward to get, just to kind of get some of the more media stuff of this. Just let me, let me see if I can explain my understanding of how you were able to perpetrate the fraud just in a, in a nutshell, you worked in a small department. Well, and first off, you, so you worked at a company that got acquired by ING. And when that happened, all of a sudden, you just got granted the authority to approve checks up to a quarter million dollars, right? That would like just sort of like this is weird, but okay, whatever, a quarter million dollars, right? Okay. And then, and then since it was a small department, if you guys wanted to get stuff done when somebody was sick or on vacation or something like that, you, like you, you had, if you were to use normal internal controls, everything would just kind of shut down. So you shared passwords and logins so that if somebody happened to be gone or sick or on vacation, that you could still do your job. And then all of a sudden, one day you had kind of this light bulb moment where you go, oh, wait a second, I could go in and I could request a check as me and I could go in as somebody else and approve that check through them. And then I could pick up the check and then that's my check. And that's, that's sort of how, that's the idea that forming that was more or less how you, how you committed the fraud. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah, you make it sound so easy. Yeah. It really wasn't that easy. Okay. Well, well, what was it? Tell me a little bit more about the D because I, oh, sorry. Did you, did you mention the foreign, the foreign currency bit like where, where, where the stuff got buried? Or did you mention that? I would not get that later later in the story a little bit. Okay. Got it. Okay. Sorry. Not jumping ahead. Sorry. Yeah. He doesn't know you as well as I do Nathan. Let me be correct. But yeah, I'll just, I'll just, listeners can't see it, but I'm fading into the right. Like Homer Simpson into the bushes. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So tell me a little bit about because you touch on it in the article where you had, there was something about like picking up the checks too, because it, because usually, you know, the separation of duties is something like you have, you have one person who has physical assets of the physical control of the asset. You have someone else who, who does the booking, keeping in someone else who does the reconciliation. Wasn't there some part of the story where you, you also had to have an excuse to go and pick up the checks that were getting processed through your, your, your, your fraudulent system? Correct. Yeah. So, as far as the, the check pickup went on, on a normal daily basis, one of our, you know, lower level employees, she would grab the check registers or our admin system that sent the check one over every night to people's, automatically printed out some reports. And as part of that, there was a check register. So, here's the checks that were sent over to people's off to be printed. She would grab that report, walk across the street to the division, because the same person printed the checks for all seven divisions around many out, in the Minneapolis campus. And they would print the checks, paperclip them, put a post at Noodon, reinsurance, REB, you know, all the, all the things, put them in a, in a three ring binder with a log. And that said in an empty cubicle. So, every morning this girl would grab the check register, walk across the street, grab reinsurance checks, initial that she took the checks. She would bring them back to our boss, the controller. He would verify that the checks that printed match the check register, that's the checks we're expecting. And from there they were sent out. So, I was the backup for both of those people on that, in that thing. So, if, if that girl was not there that day, I was the one to pick up the check register, walk across the street, pick up the checks, bring them to my boss. So, when I was gonna steal money, she had to be young, so I could be the one to pick up the checks, or when my boss was gone, she would go pick up the checks, bring that back to me, and I would verify that the checks matched the register. So, either he needed to be gone, or she needed to be gone. And so, you know, early on in my fraud, it was, I would only do it days that I knew that one of those two was gonna be gone the next day, but then later I would just, that girl actually reported to me, so I would, you know, I'd need money to this week, so I would go through the process, request the check, approve it as somebody else, then I would go to her and give her the day off the next day. You know, you've been doing a great job, I just take tomorrow off, and she thought I was just this amazing manager, and it was just one more. Best boss ever. Best boss ever. Just talking to my eyes on the checks. Yeah. Did she give you a world's greatest boss mug at any point? She just verbally. Just verbally. Just verbally gave me the, you're such a great boss. So, yeah, got it. Well, and that's not uncommon. At my work, the guy who hired me, I ended up, he had perpetrated a fraud over a number of years before I even got there, and it was, it was a weird, weird thing not to get into that too much, but one of the really, I loved him as a bot. He was a great guy to work for. He was just a nice guy. I considered him a close friend. How were your people skills as, I mean, obviously your, this person who worked for you was there, were you, were you, were you kind of a star? Was it, was everybody enamored with you at, in your department at ING? You know, early on in my career there, I worked my butt off, which allowed me to be promoted, allowed me to, you know, keep taking up more responsibility, you know, my reviews on an annual basis were top notch. And then, so when I started committing the fraud, yeah, I mean, I was on some level of high producing employee there. I think people liked me even though, I don't know, I've always been kind of like, I don't, like brooding. I guess I can, I guess also tracks, also tracks. I would say that, historically, if you came to my office to talk to me about something, it was serious because I tried to set an atmosphere where people didn't bother me, but no, I mean, I think I could be nice, I could be engaging, I could be it, you know, all of those things I needed to. But you, but it sounds like you, you, you created career capital for yourself just by working your butt off because it sounds like you were very motivated and very focused on you, you, you wanted, you wanted to make money. And so that's because of that and employers like that, if you're motivated to make money, then and you're willing to do whatever they tell you to do to make it, you're going to be a star. So is that, is that more or less correct? I think that, that's a big part of it, which is why I think, especially from my boss, I had a lot of trust. You know, I think, much trust in, yeah, when I was able to do it, you know, again, it was like all these things got to fill together to make all of this possible. But I do think that my, my work ethic, my, you know, results, how I did things. That's why I continue to, to get more responsibility and get more trust within the department, which, which really helped, you know, in the stealing the money and covering it up. So, gotcha. So, um, so like you, like you alluded to before, there was kind of a phase one and a phase two to your fraud that there's some interesting things about phase one. So, you only stole, you stole less than $100,000 in phase one. And, and basically you were like, you were thinking, I want to get out of debt. And so, so you had listened to a lot of Dave Ramsey, and you're like, Dave Ramsey, you are a man of the Lord, and you've inspired me to still make company to pay, to get out of debt, because that's what God really wants. I, no, I'm, uh, but, but that, that was the motivation, right? Correct. So, we were my, now ex-wife, we were having a baby, um, that whole, every part of like my story was a liar of, uh, fraud. Like, we're going to have a baby. I thought that, you know, the best thing for our daughter is for, you know, a mom to stay home, you know, quit her amazing career. My ex-wife is, she had a great job, super smart, amazing person. I basically convinced her that she should quit her job and be a stay-at-home mom, you know, at that point, I was like, well, okay, I, I, I worked two jobs, you know, I was working at real-life star, and then I had G, but I was still working at that CPA firm. So, I was working basically two full-time jobs, you know, made good money at the time. Could I support the family on one income or my two incomes? Yeah, but then, you know, the next part of the lives, I had a bunch of debt my wife didn't know about. And so, oh, at that point, I'm like, what do I do? Do I come clean to earn and be like, hey, I have this debt you didn't know about, um, which obviously, that, you know, being honest was not my thing back then. So, I wasn't about to admit that to her. Now, I can't really make more money. I'm already working two jobs. So, how do I come up with an additional money to keep paying off this debt? So, that's when the thought of the frog popped into my head like, you know, that's when I started justifying. Not that it was okay or, you know, like not wrong, just justifying it from the standpoint that could I do this? You know, could I steal money and what's it for? And I convinced myself, number one, it was my only option, and which was a lie, because my whole life was about appearances. And so, I wasn't willing to like live on a budget. I was all about appearances, keeping up with the Joneses and like, so I convinced myself, well, I couldn't, I don't have any other option but to steal, you know. And so, that was a lie. And the other thing that convinced myself was I was doing it for my family, which I wasn't. I was doing it to keep up appearances. You know, yes, I was going to use the money to pay out debt. And, you know, have my, my wife say hell with my child, but it wasn't about that. It was about the, you know, I'm, I can support my family. My wife can quit her job and say, oh, how does that make, that makes me look successful, you know, in my skewed view of success back then. And so, it was all, it was all for the wrong reason. And it was all lying to myself about it. But that's, no, that was, that was the decision I made. Can I, can I just clarify one thing? Did you come to the relationship with your wife? Did you come to the marriage with the debt? Was that something that you came with or what did that happen after y'all had been married? Yeah. So, lay, go on through school. She was a year younger than me. Her family was wealthy, but she didn't have, you know, when I graduated college, I had credit card debt. I had a lot more school loans than she had. And I, for my childhood, even though it, it doesn't make sense, like, in back, I like carried shade with my financial situation. And so, when I finished school and I had all this debt, and she finished school, and she didn't, I just felt like, well, I don't, like, basically, I don't think she would, she would be with a guy like me who has all this debt. Like, I'm just not going to tell her about it and stuff. And so, with her finances, since I kind of ran everything, we somewhat kept separate finances in that, you know, her dad was a big president. She already had her big account. She already had her credit. She already had that stuff I had mine. So, we had one joint account, but I paid our bills. I did our tax as I handled our finances. And so, and she just didn't care, you know, and so she, she really was kind of a perfect victim for me, because she trusted me and she really, she didn't care about money or material stuff at all. So, but yeah, that was stuff I brought to the relationship. Got it. Yeah. And so, so the next, the next beat in the story is probably my favorite part, because if, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was like the last check, because you kept transferring balances to your credit card, and you send checks into your credit card. And it was like the last check so that you would be, so all this debt that you brought with you is completely out the door. And then at that moment, you had the like a crazy scare. Tell us that part of the story if you, if you would. Right. So, I was, I was counting the checks from ING's account to my credit card company, because I felt like back started because obviously I couldn't write a check to myself. I needed to send it to somebody where the payee would look normal on the system. And so, I had a credit card with the financial institution that, you know, we had an insurance company that we did business with. And I thought, okay, it's just going to look like a little commission check. And so, I had set that up, you know, I called the credit card, but I was like, is it okay if my employer reimburses my travel expenses by cutting and charged you directly? And they're like, we don't care who pays us as long as so many pays us. You know, and so for me, it was like, perfect. I'm going to cut checks, send them, pay that off. So, like you said, over that summer, I paid off that credit card, I transferred balances from other credit cards, I paid those off. I used, remember the convenience checks you got in your statement every month, I used that to pay off my school loans, I paid off my card, paid off all this debt that my wife didn't know about, you know. And so, I get towards the end of the summer. And I have, I have spreadsheets of my entire frauds. I have all this stuff. So, I can be a true accountant. Right. You're calculating your, your utilization rate for your fraud. I love my spreadsheets, but not as much as the FBI. So, I, I get to the end of the summer, I'd cut a check for 5500, you know, my first check was 1100 over the summer, grew, you know, 1500, 1800, 2000, up to 5500. I'm able to check off. And by this time, I'm extremely paranoid, you know, I'm, I didn't think it was going to work from the start. And every time I did, I was more convinced I was going to get caught, you know, even though it wasn't huge in miles, it's, I still was like freaking out. So, every time I'd done it, the process was the same, the timing was the same. Longing into people's office requested check as myself, log out, log right back, back he was my coworker approved the check, pick it up the next day, mail it to my credit card company. Two days later, it hits my credit card the day after that, it clears the bank. I can see the process through people's soft, through my credit card state, you know, online. So, you had it down cold. Sounds like you had it down cold. It worked the same every single time. So, this last check, I mail off day two, it doesn't show up on my credit card, statement day three, it doesn't clear the bank. A week goes by, so I'm not up convinced, they caught it. They know, you know, like literally waiting for, I was waiting for the, you know, I have to be out of the jump off from one of my desk when I got to work every day. And so, two weeks go by, nothing. And so, I'm just like, you know, my daughters do in a couple of weeks, like I'm freaking. I walk in one day, and I get, and I laugh about this was something that they like, do people still get those, like, inner office mail envelopes, you know, where you'd get stuff from, from the different departments around the country. And so, I get an envelope, I open it up, there's the check. And so, it turned out that I forgot to put my account information on the check when I mailed it off, credit card company gets the check, doesn't know what to do with it, they mail it back to you, addressing the check, which is accounts payable in Atlanta, personally accounts payable, gets the check, looks it up, sees that I'm the requester, because she knows me, she just sends me the check back. And so, kind of like, this guy'll know what, I don't know what to do with it, this guy'll know what to do with it. This was somebody I talked to every single day. So, when she looked at the thing, I was my check, she said, go, it's nothing's like sent it back to me. And so, at that point, I'm like, that was like my, that was my one off, that was my, like, reminder from God or something, like, it's time to stop this, like, you got away with one there. It was your reminder from Dave Ramsey, he was like, okay, you paid off your debt. Now, let's, let's wrap this up, because you're done, right? Right. Right. No, it was, so there was that scare. And there was the, like, the objective I had done what I set out to do. I had paid off my, I was a paid off my credit card, I said, paid off my car. You know, I paid out $83,000 of debt. Never bought one thing. Not, I didn't spend the money on any, I had just paid out debt. That was done. Stop stealing. Move on. So, yeah. So you were the world's most responsible fraudster. Right. First sex moment. First sex moment. Okay. So, well, and an interesting thing, because this just came to mind while you were talking, if you had flipped that around, and if you had logged in as a coworker to request the check, and you had been the person approving the check, that would, it would have blown up right there, because the check would have got sent back to somebody else, not you. And they would have been like, this is not okay, check. And you would have been caught that way too, right? Yeah. That's, that's actually, I've never thought of that. But yeah, 100% because yeah, because I think what I've thought about this fraud in the past, I go, it's probably kind of arbitrary. And maybe sometimes Nathan logged in as the, and requested it, sometimes maybe logged into approved as yourself rather than as somebody else. But it sounds like you had a system where you were always the requester, and you always logged into somebody else as the approver. I would guess out of the 99 times I did it, there were times that I didn't do it as I do like that. I go like, like, here's the thing, like, you know, we had a team of six people. I know there was people that had their passwords on a posted note of their monitor. And so, of course, at least one time, my coworker that I usually used her password, it didn't work. And so instead of like locking up her thing, because I had test, I had tried twice, I just grabbed some other girls and requested it as her and approved it to me. So I know that I did, you know, I'm sure a few times, flip it around and request it by asking somebody else to approve it as myself. But yeah, on that case, that's a great point that I never thought of that, that could have, that could have stopped it all right there. And it's funny, because we all laugh about people having just their passwords on a posted note on their computer. But like I laughed, I scorned your coworker and then immediately I was like, oh, I absolutely have some passwords on posted some of my computer too. So it's, I mean, it's, it's not like too far-fetched. So that, so here, here's the part, so part B of your fraud. Phase two. Phase two. Phase two. Because clearly your motivation was I want to get out of debt. And then like, what was your motivation for phase two? Was it just like what you were talking about in terms of growing up and just like you, because you were comfortable, you said, I mean, I would, I think if, if all of my commercial debt was paid off, I've got my mortgage, but I've got a decent job of making some okay money, then I'm okay. And yeah, so what, especially thinking you probably could have just shut it down and gotten off Scott free, but you decided to go back in and go back in hard for phase two. What was that motivation? So. And here's the thing I get from other people, like, we were with you on the first part, but when you went phase two, that's when you lost us, you know, because you could solve the book, you could understand, hey, I'm trying to get out of debt, take care of the family, but phase two. It seems, it seems noble. That stuff all seems kind of noble. So with phase two, and again, I remember this, and again, I have, I have the business set up for the business that I set up, so I know the dates of all this stuff. So in March of 2004, you know, it's been six months since what I call the scare. So the scare is, is, is wearing off, you know, the miserable life I was living over that 83 grand six months prior, and I counted for God about it, you know, things were, things were good now. My little girl's six months old, you know, works going well, financially, I made a good place. So I'm sitting at my desk and I was thinking, you know, I did all that work to steal that money, and I didn't even do anything fun with it. And so like literally that was my thought, like just, off the rails, insane, you know, self thought. So at that point, it was like, and how, you know, how could I do this? And, and you know, really have some fun with it, like, you know, really literally ramp this up and, and you know, start buying some stuff. And it wasn't from this standpoint, like, okay, I want a new car. I want to watch. I want to this, there was, I had nothing in my mind about what I would buy if I had this money. I just thought, but, you know, basically, let's go. And so I once again, I committed to it. Just like the first time, once I had committed to it in my mind, I was going to do it, you know, even, even though I could sit there all day long, I think this is a horrible idea. Like this is, this is not a good idea. This is not going to work. You're going to get caught all these negative things. Once I committed, I was like, I'm in, like, and so the only thing up in the air right now is how am I going to do it, you know? And so at that point, I was like, with, with the credit card thing, what I did like about it was mailing those checks off. I'd lost control over the process. And so I wanted to commit my fraud in the way that I had total control of the process. So I need to be able to get those checks and put them in a bank account and have full access to everything. And so that's what I thought. And to me, it's some basic. This is like, in bezel, they're one on one. Well, I'm going to set up a company with the same name as one of our brokers. And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to cut checks. And it looks like it's to a broker, but it's right in my account. So I went through that process of, you know, I got a federal ad number, right? I filed a name with the secretary of state. I had a PO box. I had a business bank account at Wells Fargo. I had a business on a paper solely to commit fraud, which again, you know, the, the biggest thing that the FBI used to turn and come believe is that I filed a legit tax return on that business and reported all my stolen money. So the joke there is I didn't want to lose my license over this. So. But also, I mean, that's, I mean, that's someone who's financially savvy, who's a professional, you know, in accounting, that you're going to go, yeah, if I've got a business, I want everything to look legit and part of part of getting cots going to be, you know, we've all watched untouchables. So we all know that the IRS is how bad guys go to jail. Yeah. So that's the other here. Yeah. So, uh, so yeah. So that, that all, that all makes sense to me. What were, so what were some of the, uh, well, I guess, uh, yeah, you were, you must have been spending money just hand over fists then once it started hitting your account. Yeah. So it started small and unnoticeable. And I recognized, I had rules early on that I used to stop following, you know, but like, when I first started stealing money, the first big check I took there was $27,000. I was a trial, you know, raised a bunch of suspicion. $27,000 is a ton of money to me at that point. Right. But at that time, I'd go to Best Buy every week by new release CDs, DVDs, I bought a TV. Those are the black things that people would be, oh, you must be stealing up four DVDs this week. You know, I gave it, uh, I got into watches. And so I bought my first lake, $800 watch and like, as stuffy fall, I spent more money. And so like, I just would go to the grocery store and not worry about when I spent that week or, you know, I might go buying a couple new shirts. And it just was, it was all small stuff that wasn't noticeable. The first vehicle that I wrote a check for, I had the same vehicle. My lease ran out. So I got the same vehicle again. I just wrote a check for it. So I'm driving the same vehicle. That doesn't raise any suspicion, you know. Right. Right. It got to the point where I was like, I had some lies in there. I had, as I was starting to spend a little more money, noticeable money, but not like, well, that's crazy. One of the things people knew, everybody knew I worked two jobs. Nobody knew much money I made. My wife didn't even know much money I made. She didn't care, you know. But everybody knew that the CPA that I worked for nights at weekends, they knew that he wanted me to come back full-time and buy him out in retirement. They knew everybody knew that he wanted me back. And so I was like, yeah, he's shunned and tights me back. So he's giving me more work, more clients, more money. And so, you know, I'm making, you know, two, three grand more a month than I was. And that explained some of that spending. And then it got to the point, you know. But that wasn't really happening. You, you were just, that was just your, that was your lie to cover up your spending or was he really doing that? No, he wasn't doing that. Okay. I was still working there. Yeah, but not this extra stuff in this, you know, there was, there was no extra. So. Okay. Once it got to the point where I, I wanted to buy something that didn't make sense. It would have been like, this doesn't make sense from my wife, my family, friends, co-workers. It was a motorcycle, you know, it was a $35,000 motorcycle. I was like, how am I going to do this? How can I explain this money? And so that's when I kicked off the, the gambling thing. And I had never really been a gambler before, but I knew from doing taxes that if you would have jackpot over $1200, you'd get a W2G. You get a tax form that says you want to have some auto dollars. So I don't care if I win money or lose money. If I have a tax form that says I want that amount of money, I can spend it on a money is the way I looked at it. So. Right. You know, I tested my hypothesis. Like I, I took like probably $40,000 to a casino. I played high dollar video poker until I won 30 grand. I went home and told my wife, hey, I just happened to win 30 grand today. I'm going to buy this motorcycle and I told everybody that everybody, like the first time, everybody's like, oh, that's a great story. Everybody's really happy for you that you won 30 grand, you know? Right. But then when I need a, I need 55 grand for a car, I want to buy. And then I need, you know, every time I do it, like the third time you go to the casino with a couple with $70,000 in their people are like, I've been to a casino before. I'm pretty sure they don't just like hand out money like this. And so it was, it was early on in that that people were starting to really question. Okay. I had it down. I had never, I never let people gamble with me and never let people see stuff. I would just show up with fistfuls of W2s and and but tons of money on. And so that was just because those W the, because it's a W2G that's the gambling one, right? Right. And that and all they care about is how much you won, not how much you, you blew to get. So if you won, it's not it's not a net winner loss. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I didn't know that about those. So that's, that's very interesting in that. And again, very, yeah, obviously this was very well thought through process to cover your tracks and to and even like from a money money laundering kind of position, you were the, you brought it out dirty, but you took, you took it out of your bank account pretty clean and justifiable. So just in terms, like going back to what you were talking about, like right at the beginning, because you said like when you're in high school, you were popular, you were a good athlete, like everything was kind of going your way, but you were still just not a happy dude. Were you, when you were, when you were rolling in it with this stuff, with the money getting us get by on the stuff, you had this, you didn't have to worry about, you didn't, you didn't buy hamburger on sale, you bought steak and day, you know, damn the coupons that kind of thing. What were you happy during that time? Did it, did it, you know, my, my assumption is still no, but also I got to think maybe yeah, you were. I mean, an honest reflection on that was that a happy time for you. It was absolutely miserable. Really was miserable from the standpoint that I just looked at myself as more of a fraud, you know, it's really, it's really easy to be a big shot and spend somebody else's money. I wasn't earning the money. It nothing like, it felt cool at times to be able to like do things that other people probably would never do or take my friends on a trip or do something. There was like some level of satisfaction in that. What the bottom line was the, the, the misery of knowing that I was just a loser stealing the money. The bottom line of always knowing I was going to get caught and what it was going to do to me and tear apart my family and the things I was going to do to everybody around me was miserable. And you could see it in me in over that time period how, how much I changed, how, how dark I got, how withdrawn I was, how horrible I was to other people because I hated myself, you know, I was just, I was a miserable person from every standpoint. I treated people like like garbage. I was a huge jerk to everybody because I was just so disgusted by myself and I just lashed out in others because of that. So it was just, it was an unhorrible miserable time and it just got worse and worse and worse, you know, like every day. So I want to ask you, I just want to ask you about something you said. So even during that time, you knew where this was going to end up. Like you knew this ended with the fraud collapsing and the, and whatever the consequences of that would be you, it's somewhere in your mind, you knew that. Right. There was times where, you know, like I said, I had rules early on where I would only steal as much as I could, you know, keep the books even, which, you know, well, well, hit on that before stage and how I got that stuff past auditors and how I made it, you know, go away. You know, if I would have quit after a million dollars, I probably would have got away with that kind of thing. There was times I was like, you know, should I quit? Should I be dumb with this? The whole thing was, even though it was miserable, it was so addicting like the money, the fraud was just an absolute rush every time to do it, you know, there's so many pieces, but I was never, I was never in true denial about what the end game was. And that gap more and more clear to me as time went on, you know, when I got to the point where I didn't want to do it anymore, my life was horrible. I could not function anymore. There was no way out of it. There's no way out of this without me going to prison, you know, and that was the, what I got to the point where I stopped stealing. It was like, I'm just going to stop and wait, somebody's going to figure it out at some point. I never had, I never had the courage at any point to even think about turning myself in, but I knew that the writing was on the wall from early on and that that got more and more apparent to me throughout the whole time. Right. And I could see that almost like becoming like a vicious circle, too, where if you're going, I know I'm going, I mean, if I stopped right now, eventually I'm going to, if somebody's going to figure this out, I'm going to get caught. So why not keep doing it? Why not, why not ride this till it has to end instead of ending it myself? If I'm going to get caught one way or the other, was that was that part of your mindset at all? There was definitely like a cycle in that everything that did maybe feel horrible. And so I did something worse to cover that. Oral is up, which made me feel more horrible. So, you know, I'm going to steal this today. I'm going to buy this. I'm going to do this, treat somebody like trash. I'm going to do something horrible to cover up the last one. And every, it just got this downward spiral of just the horribleness. And it just, it got to the point where there was no way out for me. You know, there was just, yeah, there was, I just thought there was no way out. And I just had to like step back and wait for it to happen. See, Hey, Caleb, didn't you have some sort of question about a foreign currency exchange or something like that that you wanted to ask? Well, it kind of doesn't seem that important now. Well, lay it on us, because I think this is again, one of the unexpected twists, because our audience, we have, we have a lot of people who, who just listen casually, we've got a lot of people who listen to our podcast, who are professional CPAs. I was very, I thought it was very interesting and very creative. The way that you buried the, your, your fraud in the books at ING, which was through foreign currency, which, which part of why that seems so novel is that, I think for the vast majority of people, we never, you can go your whole career without having to audit or, you know, if you're in public, you never audit a company that does foreign currency exchanges, or if you're in a company, if you work in industry, you don't, your company just does, you know, domestic business. So, but you, but that's where you, where you found a convenient place to keep this out of sight from like you said, from the auditors. Can you tell us a little bit more about the like the nuts and bolts of that? Yeah, so with phase two, with phase one, all I did was, when I would request a check, I would credit cash debit right off, like literally. Oh, okay. I had huge, we could, we could write off large amounts. So, to write off 83 year anniversary, a summer was nothing. But what's why did I'm all started raising up? I ran into the thing where I need to put it somewhere. And then I need to figure out how to get rid of it, you know, it's so as there's this growing, what I call my growing fraudulent balance in this ledger account that I reconciled on a multi-basis. I need to get this reconciliation with millions of dollars of fraud in the balance, pass my boss on a multi-basis, pass auditors, probably twice a year, internal and external. So, I mean, I see control testing people going on at that tide, state insurance examiners, there's a lot of people digging into this stuff. And so, the first thing I identified, and again, this is because I spent six years reconciling the account where I was going to stick this. I knew how my boss is going to look at it. I knew how auditors were going to look at it. I knew, you know, I knew how to manipulate a 22 year old fresh auditor into, you know, confusion, letting me convince them what they should put in their work pay place. Wait, how, how do you do that? You can't just, you can't just drop that. This not tells how you did it. That's it. This is the common, this is the common theme in a lot of these stories. It's like, yeah, young auditors that you kind of just stick down a very strange and impossible path. Quickly, the account that I was going to put this in was we had a, we had a Canadian subsidiary and so a single standing office in Canada where everything happened in Canada because of regulatory purposes. We had an office, we had workers there, you know, the investments backing the reserves were up there. They collected all the premium up there. They paid all the cake claims, the commissions up there, everything happened there. And I had to filter down into people's office in the United States. And so we call this the Canadian package. So basically on a monthly basis, they had to get me, there are three pieces of information. They had their contract related stuff. They had access to our admin system. So they processed all their stuff on our admin system. That flowed straight to people's office. They had their, you know, the general expense items, their expense stuff from their office. What I did was, I took, you know, their child belts on a monthly basis, figured out their expenses and I made an entry to people's office on a monthly basis for their expenses. The third piece was the investment income. So let's say we had $200 million up there in investments backing the reserves. All that money was in T-bills and bonds in 10 million Canadian dollar increments. So on a monthly basis, we're receiving interest payments and buying and selling T-bills and bonds. So all of that came through me. So I would verify the contract related stuff in admin. I made the entries for the general expense items. The investment activity all came to me. I would put together an exhibit with the Canadian dollar entries for everything. I would translate it to US dollars for this exhibit to investment accounting in Atlanta. They would make the entries. So those are the three pieces. In addition to that, I had to reconcile their bank account. So on people's office, we had one ledger account Canadian bank that was actually made up of five actual bank accounts in Canada. Three Canadian dollars and two in US dollars. So I was reconciling five accounts and two currencies in the one ledger account in US dollars. So it was a mess, you know, there's always for instance these difference. There's just a ton of different types of activity there going on and I had to reconcile it. So it's a mess. I was the only person who had worked on this the whole six years at that point I had been there. Nobody really knew all the pieces out. I'll fit together, including my boss. So I was like perfect spot to put this, you know, like I'm just going to, I'm going to, you know, I still money credit cash debted this account. And so I've got this growing debit balance in this ledger account that number one, I need to get past my boss and auditors. So that part of it was again, from doing this for years, I knew that when on off quarter and months, my boss was going to, he was going to verify my register, my reconciliation. And he was going to verify the ledger balance off a query that I gave him because he didn't know how to query stuff. So there you go. I would query the balance of the account. Let's say it's eight million dollars, but three million of that eight million is my fraud. I would query it, I could download it into Excel. And I would just subtract off three million and print it out. And he would tie to an incorrect balance, just super based, just it. But on off quarter or on quarter and months, like year and auditors in my boss, they would tie my reconciliation back to an actual trial balance or balance sheet. So I come fake the balance. So I find a fake reconciling item. So same concept. When investment accounting made their entry every quarter, fry and G investment activity, they made one entry to people soft for all the investment activity across ING Americas. So there's one entry that was thousands of lines along representing billions of dollars in activity. I would query that entry. I need to find a three million dollar entry that I need to make it look like they hit our books upon accident. I query it. I find a three million dollar entry. I bring this query into Excel. The three million dollar entry that I need is a fake outstanding item. I changed the business even the account and make it look like they hit our account in error. And I quoted on my reconciliation investment accounting here our account in error will correct next month. And so the reason it worked was because that's how we moved money around within within ING and people soft was instead of you know, you get my money instead of you wiring me the money, you just do a cash transfer entry over people soft, you know, your business you with my business, you did people soft handles that do to do from in the middle, you stick it where and people made those entries all the time and they made them incorrectly. So our reconciliation is every multi had cash transfer entries that were done incorrectly. Super common. So I just made it look like investment accounting, they tagged our account should have been security life of Denver. My thought at the time was is internal audit or external orders. Are they going to say, well, our team in Denver can verify that they have an outstanding item for three million because they should have got that entry and you got it. They never did that. So I just meet an entry. And again, I was always like, how does nobody find this? Because when I check my people's liations, the first thing I do is run the queries because many independently verified my queries and they allowed me to use queries downloaded a new Excel that I could just manipulate. So super basic spell off. Right. Well, if I was in Denver, I would have been like, I would have been like the hell is this three million dollar charge because that yeah, because you think somebody's reconciling that side too. And maybe eventually I guess people just throw up their hands and go, who knows what the hell this is? We like you said, it's billions and billions of dollars. It's a dust on the dust on the scales. Forget about it. Write it off and move on. Right. So so that was the the the first part of it. How do I get it past them? I just could fake stuff and you know, I could make a query say whatever I wanted because they would accept an Excel and they the nap. Nobody ever asked me to run one in a query in front of them. Nobody could run the query themselves. So it was just like no independent verification of my queries. The second part was, well, how do I make that go away? You know, I can't write it off now. I can't sense it. How am I going to give rid of eight half million dollars? You know, like and so that's where I thought just in general, I was like, I don't want to I don't want to make an entry just for my fraud. You know, like the only explanation for this entry is to get rid of fraud. I wanted to manipulate something that I was already doing to chisel away at that bounce. And so back to the the the Canadian package, the investment activity. So on a monthly basis, you know, there might be 50 billion dollars of activity because they might buy and sell, you know, five different 10 million Canadian dollar T bills or bonds. So the amount of activity investment wise could be significant even if the net was small. So I was like, okay, here's what I need to do. I list out my activity. So by 10 million $2,000,000 T bill, you know, sell by sell whatever it is. So now I have all my Canadian dollar amounts for my investment activity for the month. I was supposed to use the average monthly exchange rate of $2,000 to US dollars to translate that activity to US dollars to put in. So now that I have that in there, it's it's 0.92. Okay, well, what if I'm manipulated? Now, I know my entries are supposed to translate at 0.92. Well, what if all the debits I translate to 0.91 and all the credits I translate to 0.93? And so I credit my account for more than it should be credited for and I debited for less than it should be debited for. Over time, it's going to eat away at that, you know, every every entry that's a credits to every debit some too low. Over time, that would eat away at that bounce like silently eat away at that bounce. And so the first time I did it, like you look at it, I know that these are all 10 million Canadian dollars. So this column should all be 9.2 million US dollars. But this one's on 9.3 million dollar credits in 9.1 million dollar debits. So when I look at the exhibit, I'm like, this does not look right. So I'm taking a chance at sending this to someone to actually enter. You know, the girl who did that stuff. I had known her for years. I assumed if she spotted it and asked me, I could just say, screwed up, forgot to update the rates. With everything I did, I was like the first time I could probably get away with it being a screw up, linger, I'm screwed. But so, you know, the first time I did it, my side to tour, she made the entries. The next thing was, you know, I showed the exhibit with the .92 translation of my boss. Then I had to show him next month that those entries all went at, you know, .92 translation 9.2 million. They didn't all the credits were 9.3 and all the debits were 9.1. So I would query it down on a Excel and type in what I wanted to say. You didn't have no experience. So over a four year period, every single month, I, every debit that hit that account for investment activity was less than it should be. And every credit was more than it should be. And so I ate away about 5.5 million dollars that, that balance over that four year period. So there was about three million dollars of that balance left in there when I got busted. So that's it. Um, so actually, first off, fun fact, there is an actor that I follow on PornHub called the Canadian package. So that's just a weird coincidence. Um, but also just, uh, just curious. Uh, I mean, the next, the next point of the story is how did you get caught? Because I, uh, yeah, because it was, it was not internal audit. It was not external audit. It wasn't, you know, the insurance auditors, it wasn't any of those people to tell the, tell the folks what happened. So obviously, like, I had, I had thoughts all along. Who's going to catch me, you know? And initially, I thought with all the audits, internal X, turn up like all the people they had thrust up. And every single person that audited our books went through the Canadian package, which quickly, what I did to the young auditors was I would lay all this paperwork out like, you guys all enough to remember like the green line dot matrix paper. I think that's a big green line dot matrix paper. I had all these different exhibits. And I would lay everything out. And when I did my reconciliation, I had every, every different color highlighter met something different. So I would take this 22 year old kid and I would start doing like, this is goes to this, this, this, this, look, and I would just talk them in circles until they just were assied. I had no idea what I was talking about. And from going through this, I knew that they had the same work papers every year. They had the same stuff every year. And they're like, so what should we put in our work papers? And I would tell them what to put. They would put it in. And they would go out of the next thing. So it was just praying on the confidence of a young auditor that's not going to say, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what's happening. I don't understand. Yeah. I need to go and ask my senior. I need like always just praying on that they don't want to do it. So they're not going to bring it up. And they're just going to all right and move on. So right or or alternately, they've got all this pressure to be like, don't we've got so many billable hours budgeted at this project. You better damn sure to make sure you're not over there. And if you're talking about all this complicated stuff, they go, okay, I'm just going to take his word on this because I don't want to get the beat down from my from my manager about going over hours, too. So yeah, brilliant. So, okay. So that's how you manipulate the auditors. So back to how I got caught. So first it was auditors, they never caught anything. The next thing I thought the IRS might come dating because of my extreme income gross over a four period. Yeah, you know, that money was all going on my taxes. In addition, so on my actual taxes, I had my normal W2 income. I had a schedule C with millions of dollars. And then I also had my gambling income, which was washed by game of losses. And so there's a lot of stuff happening on my taxes. So I thought going from, you know, 150 grand to a million to two million to four million might raise red flags enough to get audited. So they did not come knocking until after I got busted. So then I was like internally, who's going to catch me? I already mentioned, I didn't think my boss would find it just based on knowing his limitations within our systems and stuff. So I was like, the person I think is going to catch me is my co-author who's password I'm using for many reasons. You know, she's the smartest person there. She knows everything I know. And some she's the one who trained me in. She has all the access that I have. And I'm using her user idea to commit the fraud. And so I thought if anyone's going to catch me, it's going to be her. But she didn't really have any reason to like look at anything until in August of 2007. So I stopped stealing in like June or July. And I was just in must like waiting period, you know, like somebody's going to find it. So we get an email from accounts payable one day in August. And the email is to my boss, my coworker and me. And the email says, if you guys want to keep your signing, I throw 250,000 on checks need to have this paperwork filled out approved and sent back to us. And so instantly, my thought was this is it, you know, now my boss and coworker know that we have this signing authority that I've been abusing. This is going to be the thing that gets me caught. And even though I wanted it to be over, I was scared to death about what being caught men. So at that point, as soon as I read that email, I heard my boss walk out in the hallway and my coworker walk out there. So my walk out there and our boss says, did you guys know you had signing authority on checks? And I said, no, I didn't know that. You know, he said, would you guys need that? And I said no. And so he went right back into his office, emailed accounts payable and said, revoke that authority. They should have it. But I knew that that wasn't the end bit. And so basically what happened with my coworker is she read a query to see if her user ID was associated with any check payments and what she found was that in 2007, she had approved a million dollars in checks. And so I'm sure that was shocking to her that she had approved a million dollars in checks that year. A couple weeks later, my boss comes into my office on a two o'clock in the friday afternoon and he has me this query. And he's like, can you show me the backup for these checks? And I look at the query and it pops up to me that that's a million dollars in checks I still on that year. And he wants the backup. And so that day it turned out that the... Well, was that was that just a bullshit question? Was it was that really him just saying, I caught you stealing or was it or was at the time I thought, this is how he's confronting me. He's just messing with you right now. You know, like I assumed he knew and that this was his way of confronting me and making me sweat. Okay. The reality is just wanted vouchers and invoices. Yeah, he really he didn't know at that point. And I've talked to people their sense that they didn't suspect me until like later. So it turned out that the girl that entered that stuff that would have had that backup had it actually existed. She had to be out that day. And so I just talked my way out of the office like, sorry, I don't know where she keeps it. We can't find it. But he was really pushing me that day. It wasn't like just a casual. Oh, she's gone. Okay, it was we're digging through her desk. We're looking here. We're looking there. And you know, I knew right where that stuff was. And I, you know, for the legit stuff, I knew where that was. But I wasn't going to show it to him. Right. Because obviously there was no backup for these checks. So yeah, yeah, yeah. At that point, I knew like, it's over. I went and hauled that Friday night. I was like, it's over. Like I research lawyers. I got a lawyer on the phone that night. I went into work the next morning. I created fake check requests for all of those that million dollars in checks. Everything looked legit. You know, I copied, I copied signatures. I had, I originally, I set of my, my fake company with the same name as this insurance broker we used in Pervute. And the reason I did that is because they would send in money sometimes and not they couldn't identify what it was for. So if we could identify it, it goes into the spans. It causes a reconciling ahead of it's paying the butt. So sometimes we just send the money back. So I made it look like I was refunding money that we couldn't identify. I was just sending it to the broker. But I was sending it to myself. So yeah, I faked all these things. I was like shred and documentation. I was trying to just cover my tracks anywhere I could. I went, met with my lawyer that day. He's like, you need to go on a Monday morning. And, you know, to mount a defense, we need to know what they do. So I went in Monday morning when my boss got in. I went in there. I had a whole no book full of fake documentation. I explained my, you know, these payments were all refunds for premium. We couldn't identify. So we set it all back. And he was like, oh, that makes sense. You know, like, okay. And I was like, did I just get away with this? Right. And so at that point, he's like, I just need to go show this to Mike. Mike was our CFO. Mike was my boss's boss. And Mike was the person who signature I faked and on my fake documentation. So when he's like, I got to go show this to Mike. He walked upstairs with this notebook full of fake documentation. I ran to my office, grabbed my stuff, ran out to my car and like, squeal out of the parking lot. So yeah, that's what I was saying. My coworker said, I'll just, I'll just wait here while you go talk with Mike. Yeah. That was like, when you squeal out of the parking lot, that's when they just thought, maybe you were the one to look at. So I tipped him off, but it wasn't once you do what to look for. It was really easy to find. You know, like, I had to query me to just pull my fraudulent stolen checks. So. So, uh, so all this unfolds, you end up, uh, that, that'd be I get involved. I'm sure you go to court. You get, um, you were sentenced to, was it 97 months in jail? Yeah. And how much I'm, and you, but you only spent like about a two-thirds of that, because you got out early for good behavior. So in the federal system, you do 85% of your time, you're given your good time on the first day. So out of 97 months, I had 380 days of good time on that. So you can't earn more good time, which you can lose your good time. Okay. So I ended up doing five and a half years in prison. And so there's the, uh, the 380 days of good time. Then there's something called RDAP residential drug abuse program in the federal system, where if, if you don't have to prove your ad if you just have to prove you drank or did drugs, you know, before you got busted. So I qualified for that. So if you take that 40-week drug program, you qualify for up to a year off, you call that exactly. So I got a year off for that program. And you do your last six months on home confinement. So out of my years, I got a year off of good time, a year off for the drug program. And then the last six months, you went home confinement. So you're still a federal inmate. You're just, you can work, you can, you know, start to rebuild your family. You're just monitored on a daily basis at home, wherever you are. So, right. Five and a half years in prison was plenty, you know, when I went to prison, my kids were five and one and when it came home, they were 11 and seven. So, yeah. And five and a half years, that's, that's just barely enough time to write one article for the Journal of Accountancy. I know I've done that as well. So I mean, it took me until my last month there to get that done to you. Yeah. I'm, Nathan, I'm curious about like, what was, what was your prison experience like? I mean, how did you spend your days other than writing the JFA article? I mean, I know prison, prison obviously changes people. How did, how did it change you? Right. So like, it's a prison camp. It's minimum security. So it was not white collar prison the way I thought it'd be, you know, I was in Duluth, Minnesota. It's an old Air Force base. So it's like a hundred acre compound. When I was there, it was between 900,000 people, 85% are low-level drug crimes. So it's all like drug dealers and gay bangers from, you know, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit. It's not a bunch of accountants. So, but it's, it's basically a small community and it's managed by prison staff, but the inmates are the people doing homework. So you got to find a job. You have a 40 hour a week job there, like anything else. And so I got a job in education as an education clerk. So we had an office at a desk. I went to work every day, you know, our office was open from 7.30 in the morning until nine at night, you know. So if you weren't at shower at count time back for four o'clock, we could be at work or working out. So my daily was get up, e-breakfast, go to work, e-launch, work, work out. I lost 75 pounds. My first five months in prison when I stayed in tip top shape the whole time there. So I probably worked out an hour to two hours a day every single day. You just get it up, you get it up, up rid of love. Here's what I do every single day and you don't think about what day it is or what year it is. You just, you get a routine and you fall at routine. So weekends it slows down because you have, you don't have your work to go to, you know, you had a lot of visits. I had a lot of support from the outside world. So the whole time like for me, I was, I got there the first day somebody basically said, you know, you either, you know, you're the guy or it's time to fix yourself, you know, you have all these years of prison. This is your opportunity to become the person you want to be, like work on yourself, you know. So I had somebody that held me accountable to get in shape physically, mentally. I just started reading, reading about happiness and reading about positive attitude and all these things and positive psychology and I just got to be all there. I was part of a speaking program where we went out and spoke to college kids and business people on all these different areas and so I taught classes in prison. I did a lot of stuff I had never done before. I gave new skills in public speaking and teaching and writing and so by the time I got out, I was a different person, you know. Everybody recognized that I was in no way the person that had gone in there who was, you know, I'd just given up, you know, I thought my life was over in every way. I learned that my life was just beginning and a lot of people encouraged me and gave me opportunities a long way to be where I am and who I am out. So I'm very grateful for for wanting to all this for me, you know. Yeah. So Nathan, how much, I assume, I don't, I don't remember reading this but were you court ordered to like pay restitution for your crime? Yeah. So my career was easy in that when ING investigated, they came to us and said, you know, we think you stole a million, four to 55,178 dollars, 55 cents. Okay. And I agree. You know, I kept, I have a log of every check. I know exactly what I stole at the time. As I was committing the fraud, I didn't want to know. So I never never looked at the sum column. I kept it off the screen. But we, we agreed on the loss of the, from the start, which makes things easy. That's the exact number that my criminal restitution was. So you pay restitution while you're incarcerated, while you're up probation, and then probation last 20 years from the time you are out of prison. So I think I have like 13 or 13ish more years. And so our works is I get a bill in the mail every month, just like any other bill, they monitor, they track, you know, they track my payments every month. And so how they determine the amount is, they just come in and audit my finances whenever they want to. And so, you know, it's a full financial disclosure. They get all of my financial information, you know, income assets, expenses, liabilities, everything. And then I think it's, I think there's an IRS chart of acceptable expenses based on intent levels. And then they set my email based on that. So now when they, when they do that audit, do they rely on your queries that you pull, or do they do those queries themselves? They actually, they, they asked for a third party verification for some reason. Good, good, all right. That seems confident. Nice. Obviously, I wish I had $8 million to pay it back. I mean, I still owe $7.5 million. But the way the process works, they're not trying to crush anybody. They're not trying to put me, you know, a lot of commissioned. They want me to make an honest effort to pay what's reasonable for me in my situation. You know, child support comes first, like they make sure that I'm handling all my responsibilities. And so there's a lot of accountability there. Yeah. And it's a reason, I mean, it's a reasonable amount. So catch it. So, so just to, just to clarify that, when you said, uh, so restitution happens during your probation period, probation is 20 years after you get out of the slammer, then is it basically whatever you can reasonably pay of that $8.5 million in 20 years? That's your restitution. So that doesn't hang over your head for the rest of your life. And you're not, you know, so I've already been given my completion date of restitution with it. Okay. So basically at that point, the judge writes it off after 20 years. Okay. So have you thought about taking money and going to Las Vegas and gambling to try to pay your eight point on it? Do you play Powerball? Okay. I mean, I do play the Powerball. Um, you know, I became addicted to gambling when I was committing my fraud. And my whole fraud turned from using gambling to like explain my money to, I was just stealing the gamble. And so, you know, it's the one holdover from my fraud where I don't gamble. I don't go to casinos. I don't, I don't mess with that stuff. But, you know, the reality is, I have great data on my gambling. And I know that out of the $8.5 million, I still, I lost 6.2 million of gambling. So jeez. Holy shit. That's insane. But I also, yeah, my W2G winnings over those years, you know, I had like 178,000 of winnings in 2004, 380 and 2005, 870 and 2006 and like 1.3 million in 2007. So I was gambling, you know, but I was losing. Yeah. And again, it seems like it's just a five. It was like, I can't not gamble because this is how I justify. Right. It's how I cover my tracks. Right. So, right. So, yeah, so interesting. Um, so nowadays is your job? Speak just speaking on from what, what is your day job now? Are you a full-time speaker presenter talking about fraud and ethics? Well, um, I'm in the count again. Uh, you're in a, okay, not a, not a, not again, not your standard situation of a guy I was in prison with started a very successful business. At a time when they were growing exponentially, they couldn't afford the account they needed, but they could afford me. So, you know, we both took advantage of the situation in that they know how much experience and the ability I have and they know I could get a job somewhere else. So they gave me a chance, you know, to get back in the game. And so it's, it's been an amazing opportunity for me to grow, to continue to do something I love, to be a part of something, you know, super exciting. Obviously, we're very, we're very deliberate how we do things and setting up controls and in. We're very transparent in our communication. There's no like beating you around the bush like, I can't do this or I can't see this, you know, we don't need to whisper about it in the corner. We can all just say, because of your past, you can't do this, you know, and so yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done a lot of different stuff here. I've been here for two years now. I'm doing, I'm also in a tax role now, like a corporate tax role. So, okay, but I've got to do with a ton of stuff here. I got to use a lot of my experience. I do have, I have experienced public improv at that experience big and small. And so I've kind of seen everything and I've been able to, to use that here. And just one more thing I feel extremely lucky about his being given this chance. So I still do some speaking. I don't like actively, or actively market myself any more. Look for speaking. If it pops up, I do it. My employer is very supportive of my speaking opportunities and the ability to keep doing stuff. So I don't know, it's kind of best of both worlds. I get to keep doing this more if I get to keep speaking. I get to be myself and be, you know, open and honest about every part of my life. Cool. So one last question. It, looking back on the fraud that you committed, because obviously you've had tons of time to, to ponder it. If, have you been able to identify something that AIG, no, I am, jeez, I did it again. Could you, have you been able to identify something that I and G could have done that would have just prevented your fraud because there, because again, you even said it. You're kind of like, you found yourself in this position. It was your daily position. You knew the ins and out of it. And you can kind of go, Oh, there's a loophole there that isn't unplugged. There's a loophole there that's unplugged. Was there some, and that's just inescapable. That's, that's why we have to take ethics training as a CPAs. But have you identified something that's like, if AIG did this, it would have been a silver bullet. And I would not have been able to do my job. Oh, sorry, not been able to commit the fraud. I think that there's some rule like basic stuff. You know, a big part of the problem was that all the controls in place that would have stopped this. I was responsible for. And so, right, right. I get to manipulate a my kid. And here's here. To me, it comes down to this. And it's not necessarily I and G, but from an audit perspective, the two things were, I worked with queries that I could download into Excel and type in and nobody ever verified them. So it was as if it was an auditor saying, run this in front of me or somebody else, rhyme a creative verify it. The other thing was that when we were audited, auditors came in and they gave me a list of what they wanted in a couple weeks. And they would accept copies of source documents versus actual source documents for verification. I could fake anything. I was part of the rolling out people soft program. So I was a power user and people soft. So I could go into reports and rewrite of manipulate them, exclude things I wanted reports. So you think you're looking at a list of all checks that were printed. But I'm giving you a list of all checks that were printed except manual checks, which is my fraud. Like I could do that. You give me a printer. I can, I can run multiple reports in different areas and make it look like I ran at six months ago with a time stamp from then because I could just anything they wanted I could fake. And so it was all super basic, all super simple, just like independent third party verification of anything I have of date them. And there was no everything was accepted at face value right here. So there was no it was the professional skepticism that was that was missing where it's like we trust this guy. But professional skepticism is like we still shouldn't trust him. Let's make sure that we that we at least go yeah. But again, there's like an endless I mean, that's what makes prevention of fraud so difficult because there's an endless list of things that you should and could do to make sure nobody's to plug all those holes that are out there. But actually doing all those, you know, you end up getting this cost benefit problem where it's like we could do that. But it take a whole team of people to do that and people like you who are trying to do their job wouldn't even be able to do your job because you spend all your time trying to trying to comply with all of the the internal controls and the internal audit demands for you. So it's such a such an intractable problem fraud obviously, which but hopefully we're hopefully between your efforts of what you're doing. And we're hoping our podcast in this little way too helps to plug as many holes as we possibly can. Agreed. Awesome. And I think that's a great place to end. Well, hey, one more time man. Thank you so much for carving some time out of your data. To talk to us, we appreciate it a ton. So yeah, Moochus Gracius Nathan. Yeah, I appreciate it too. Okay, that was Nathan Muller and I thought that was great. Greg, did we learn anything? Absolutely. That was that there was so much to me that I was able to glean about this case, so much of the the kind of the more of the tacit sort of stuff, not the not the explicit here's the steps of the fraud, but it was so interesting to be able to listen to Nathan talk about like that more of the texture of the fraud and things like that. And one of the thing that really stuck out to me and I think it stuck out to you too is that Nathan, he's he's like a good accountant. He's yes, he's like really good at what he does. And the fact the fact that he is so good at what he does is the reason that he was able to like it like if anybody who was dumber than him at worse than him at that job couldn't have pulled it off. Right. I mean, just with everything he was talking about with you know, with how to how to manipulate the internal controls, even how to bury it in the in the financial statements and how to play as boss and play the auditors and stuff like that. The guy his rules, the rules that he had for how to spend the money and all of the stuff with the with the gambling 1099. I mean the guy, he was smart and he thought this shit out. Yep. Yeah, but but do you remember at the beginning where it was like so so were you real you are you great people person he was basically like no, I was not a person. Yeah, it's kind of it. It's kind of a grump and I pretty much pretty readily leave me the fuck alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but he had his cat like his like I said, his career capital was built because he was so good at what he did. Yeah. And that not only gave him the trust, but it also gave him just the raw the sheer ability to be able to pull off this fraud. So connecting some dots from my life a long time ago on a podcast, I listened to the district attorney of northern California who said his his advice was if you want to prevent fraud at your company, make sure that everybody in the accounting department just fucking hate each other like no team building. You want people to just despise you. So like like not only do they not work together well, they're like hoping somebody does something bad so they can stab them in the back with a knife and like deliver them to their boss to go see this this motherfucker needs to go. But so that and which is which is not false if your only goal is to make sure that fraud doesn't happen. But then with what we heard from Nathan, I'd like to add to that that not only do you want to hire an accounting department where they all hate each other, but also where they're all like super shitty at their job because if they're right, if they hate each other and they're shitty at their job, they can't even if they if they're shitty at their job, they're too dumb to figure out how to manipulate the accounting system to perpetrate fraud. I mean, that'd be part of it because they're they're not good at their job. And then the other part is even if they do try anyways, their co-workers are going to be ready to filet them at any moment. So there you go. That's the internal control that they don't tell you about in school. I think the other thing is that hopefully they're all a little bit lazy because as we've I think what we've discussed at Great Length in many of these episodes is that the perps end up working way harder at the fraud than they would at a regular day job. And so if you're lazy, you're not going to be like, oh, I can't. I can't keep that up. There's no way. There's a few different kind of kind of unorthodox internal controls that you can implement there. So when easy employees, average employees and employees that actively dislike each other. Yeah. Yeah. So during the interview process, if you say describe yourself in three words and the three words aren't dumb, mean, and lazy, you say, get the fuck out of here. You're not the person we're looking for. I'm I'm a disagree. I'm a disagreeable person. You're hired. I guess my biggest takeaway from this was just tell that guy spent a lot of years doing soul searching because yeah, I think he has a pretty good grasp on where he was in his life and why he did what he did, even if he doesn't maybe either talk about or know what the rationalization was because he was talking about like when you asked him, it's like, how were you feeling during this time? And he's like, I was miserable. Like, right. He wasn't he wasn't lying. Like he was definitely telling us the truth that like that period of his life was I was thinking he would be more nuanced. Yeah, I thought it'd be like he was fucking red, but also, but no, he was just straight to no, it was horrible straight head and it was and it was specifically because he knew that it was all predicated on a lie. Yeah. And that underneath everything else that he knew that was wrong. And so that is, I don't know, I've read plenty of accounts of fraud and you you read plenty of accounts of people who are, you know, that say they're remorseful or they regret their decisions or this and that and whatever. And I don't, you know, I give people the benefit of the doubt. And this was our first interview with Perp. So I guess for me to like have the conversation with him and kind of hear him and watch his body language and the tone of his voice and everything. And it's just like, no, that dude was that dude was in a dark place. And he even said like getting near the end, like just how he treated people. He just, he told us that he was in that dark place. And I was, I think I was surprised by his level of forthrightness about how bad it was for him. Right. Because when he was in which is it, which is interesting. Yeah. Because he basically said I was treating everybody as a means to an end. And you were like, oh man, I relate to that. So, but it was not what I'll have to re-listen to. No, that wasn't. No, that I didn't relate to him in that. It was like a part where he was just like where he was in that part. Not the sociopathy. That wasn't the, no. How did you connect? Have you felt that I'm a, have you felt that I was a sociopath this whole time? If you just in your eyes, just in your eyes. The, oh, let me think. Oh, I got, I got something. I'll have to bring this up with my therapist in my next session. Right. One other thing that stuck out to me that was like a true learning moment was hearing him explain what, what the whole restitution process was. I didn't know that there was a, you've got $8.5 million to repay. But if you can't pay that back in 20 years, and I guess we'll just write it off as bad debt. That's, that's fucking weird to me. I thought that that hung over your head for the rest of your life. But you, it's, they, they, they've got an end date where you're like, after this point, you're Scott free. So that, that's going to motivate a lot of our listeners to go commit those fronts because you know, the jail sentence is going to be light and you know, you're not going to have to pay back all that money you steal. So let's go get it while the getting's good. I'm all right. Yeah. Right. Well, that's it for today's episode. Everybody, remember if your New Year's resolution is to lose 75 pounds, go to a federal minimum security prison. And also remember that although AIG is an international finance and insurance corporation, it had nothing to do with today's episode. So Caleb, where can people find you out there in the internet if they'd like to get a hold of you? I'm on Twitter at CNUQuist and LinkedIn backslash. Caleb, NUQuist. Greg, where are you on the internet? I am at Greg Kite. I'm pretty much all the social media handles and my only fans is titled the Canadian package. Lovely. Oh Canada. Right. It's, it's, it's fraudulent. I'm not from there. This is a, this is a package from the great United States of America. Oh, my fraud is written by Greg Kite and myself, our producer is Zach Frank. If you like the show, leave us a review or share with a friend. That's how people find the show. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you listen. And for the accounts out there, if you listen to this podcast on earmark, you can get free CPE. I don't know about Canada though. Not available. No, not Canadians. It doesn't count for Canadian CPE. So that's a package to come later. It's a whole different package. Different package. Join us next time for more avarice swindlers and scams from stories that will make you say, oh, my, my fraud. Canadian.