In an announcement that seems plucked from the script of a white-collar crime drama, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. laid out an indictment against Michael Collins, a former marketing executive accused of embezzling close to $6 million from two employers. Collins, 61, served as the Chief Marketing Officer at a financial education company before moving on to an education-technology firm, allegedly carrying out his sophisticated embezzlement scheme at both establishments.
The charges, as reported by Manhattan District Attorney's Office, include one count of Grand Larceny in the First Degree, one count of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree, and six counts of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree. "Michael Collins allegedly used his position as a marketing executive to embezzle nearly $6 million from two of his employers over the course of 8 years," DA Bragg said.
Between March 8, 2016, and April 28, 2024, Collins is alleged to have siphoned off nearly $5 million at his first company and close to another million at the second. The scam featured two bogus marketing firms, Quattro Quadrati LLC and Regiondrivers LLC, which Collins is said to have created to funnel money directly into his own pockets. He purportedly went to great lengths to maintain the farce, fabricating email exchanges and establishing fake identities to authorize invoices for non-existent work that his employers ultimately paid for.
It didn't stop at emails and invoices. To conceal the financial footprint, Collins consulted the service that incorporated his phony firms, inquiring whether his identity could be "shielded or masked from anyone looking at the two entities through online services or research," an effort to throw potential investigators off his trail. The grandeur of his ill-gotten gains spanned executive club memberships, luxury brands, and over 150 flight tickets. A lavish $150,000 engagement ring from a boutique jewelry store was also bought directly from one of the fraudulent company's bank accounts, as per the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
The indictment was made possible with the contribution of Assistant D.A. Michael Luongo, who led the prosecution, along with the supervision of Assistant D.A.s Hope Korenstein, Kofi Sansculotte, Executive Assistant D.A. Jodie Kane, and the assistance of Paralegals Jacob Sowers and Bailey Hanson. Adding to their efforts were Principal Financial Investigator Loretta Mapp, Supervising Rackets Investigator Ryan Lemon, and others in the Forensic Accounting and Financial Investigations Unit who helped dismantle Collins' elaborate scheme.
