Pharmacy worker stole $570,000 from grocery store in 9-year refund scheme, feds say
A pharmacy employee at a grocery store stole more than $570,000 from the New York supermarket over nine years, federal prosecutors said. Now, she’s going to prison.
The former pharmacy technician, 48, who worked at Wegmans Food Market in Webster for 27 years, started stealing from the store in 2014 in a scheme involving fraudulent refunds that lasted until February 2023, according to court documents.
By using a store system that filled customer’s prescriptions, she processed about 350 fake credit card refund requests of varying amounts in the names of Wegmans customers, prosecutors said.
The woman is accused of duping the on-duty pharmacist to approve and sign off on the refund requests she created, according to prosecutors.
After the requests were approved, the woman swiped her debit card in the grocery store’s sales system and collected the refund amounts — paying herself $568,021 in Wegmans refunds, prosecutors said.
Similarly, she also processed the fake refunds to grocery store gift cards and stole $10,922 between 2020 and February 2023, according to her plea agreement.
A judge sentenced the woman, of Webster, to one year in prison and ordered her to pay $578,943.86 on Nov. 7, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York announced in a news release.
McClatchy News contacted Jeffrey Ciccone, a federal public defender representing the woman for comment, on Nov. 8 and didn’t receive an immediate response.
In court documents, Ciccone wrote that his client’s actions “were not out of greed” and she was instead trying to “provide for her son,” a 13-year-old he described as “very sick.”
When two FBI agents confronted the woman at her home in March, she was cooperative, Ciccone wrote in a sentencing statement.
She “told both Wegmans and the FBI that she began stealing funds from the pharmacy after her son was born to help pay for his medical bills and living expenses,” Ciccone added.
Webster is about 10 miles northeast of Rochester.
This story was originally published November 9, 2023 at 8:22 AM with the headline "Pharmacy worker stole $570,000 from grocery store in 9-year refund scheme, feds say."
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