In March, Christchurch office administrator Sasha-Maree Phillips was jailed for four years after stealing more than $850,000 from her employers. She had no money to show for it, having reportedly gambled it all away.
That sounds like a rare big-ticket theft, but there seem to be lots of examples of otherwise everyday folk stealing from their employers. In January, Morrinsville woman Ronel Viljoen was convicted of stealing $30,000 from the haulage company she worked for. She spent the money on various things, including repairs and servicing on five vehicles. And a couple of weeks ago, Hamilton woman Lisa Ann McKenzie was convicted of stealing at least $7000 from Early Education Waikato between 2021 and 2023.
Leave for a minute the fact that all three examples – just the most recent that came up in my online search for “theft from employer” – were women. Why do people do these kinds of cons on the people they work most closely with?
Bear in mind that all I know about these three is what I’ve read about them, and I’m not competent to diagnose people at a distance anyway. Instead, I’ve hit the books and journals to find out what we know about con-artists and fraudsters.
First, let’s partially dispel the “evil” or “criminal mastermind” stereotype. Apart from the zeros after the amounts they nicked and the massive stress those zeros placed on their employers, these three are probably depressingly mundane.
Consider one of the oldest theories of fraudulent behaviour, proposed in the 1950s. According to the “fraud triangle”, perpetrators tend to have three things in common. The first is needing money – for example, to pay for a car to be fixed or to finance a gambling habit.
The second is having the opportunity to grab someone else’s cash. Pretty much everyone who steals from their employer occupies a position of trust. We trust them to do their jobs and not nick stuff. I think this is one of the great ironies – because most of us are honest, we tend to assume everyone else is, too. If we didn’t have a general tendency to trust people, they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of us.
The third component is relevant after the nicking has begun: how do you live with yourself? Simple, you rationalise what you’ve done: “It’s only a little bit.” “The business won’t even notice it.” “I’ll pay it back.”
A fourth point was added to the triangle in the 2000s. To do it and get away with it, at least for a while, you need the capability to do so.
Although the examples I’ve cited are all women, large-scale fraud appears to be the province of middle-aged men. It’s not hard to bring to mind men who’ve committed massive fraud. Financier Bernie Madoff spent about two decades running a Ponzi scheme worth tens of billions of dollars, for example.
Of course, you probably also have to have a bit of an ego, to be a bit narcissistic, to think you’re special enough to get away with stealing like this.
And the “need” for money may not be about paying the bills but the need to be admired by others because you’ve got the trappings of the good life.
A recent study involving interviews with 17 convicted fraudsters, only 12% of whom were women, most aged 41-60, reported this group were more than usually sociable. They were also more emotionally stable, which makes it easier to not freak out when you lie to your boss’s face.
Unsurprisingly, they also tended to be more deceptive and manipulative than the average person.
“Personable liars”, as one study put it.
