A California man who cooked the books of his Massachusetts employer for over 16 years has been sentenced to prison, confirmed the Department of Justice. Darrell Pike, 57, from Hesperia, was handed a three-month prison sentence following his October 2022 guilty plea to mail fraud, with a further three years of supervised release which includes nine months of home confinement, as per a decision by Boston’s U.S. District Court Judge Myong J. Joun.
Pike's scam involved the creation of a phony staffing company, Consumer Information Systems (CIS), that he used to funnel more than $1.2 million from his employer, where he served as the general manager of their Ontario, California, subsidiary, although his crafty scheme came crashing down, and now he is ordered to repay the sizeable sum of $1,232,001 in restitution and forfeiture, authorities reported yesterday.
According to a press release from the Justice Department, Pike's fraudulent operation ran from roughly 2005 through 2021, during which time he submitted false invoices for non-existent staffing services at his employer's California-based operation, even going so far as to add unauthorized initials of company personnel to give the invoices an appearance of legitimacy.
His elaborate ruse caused the unnamed company to shell out approximately $1,271,206 to his sham company, with funds siphoned directly into a bank account he personally controlled Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy expressed his position alongside Jodi Cohen, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Boston Division, named in the announcement, who spearheaded the investigation into Pike’s prolonged deceit; the case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kriss Basil of the Securities, Financial & Cyber Fraud Unit.
