A Wauwatosa man who spent eight years working at Milwaukee Tool was sentenced to five years in prison Friday for orchestrating a scheme that funneled more than $1.4 million worth of tools out of the company's Brookfield warehouse and into his own pockets. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell handed 31-year-old Mathew Yang the sentence after Yang pleaded no contest to five felonies, including four counts of theft, with nine other charges dismissed as part of a plea deal.
The sentence closes out a case that first became public when Waukesha County prosecutors charged Yang with stealing more than $1 million worth of tools from his former employer, according to FOX6 News. Yang will serve five years of extended supervision after his prison term ends, and Maxwell imposed and stayed additional prison time tied to Yang's other felony counts, effectively placing him on probation for those charges. He was also ordered to pay Milwaukee Tool $1.08 million in restitution, a figure that reflects the company's estimate of its total loss.
How the Scheme Unraveled
The fraud came apart in March 2025, when a freight shipping company called Milwaukee Tool customer service asking about a delivery address for roughly 9,000 pounds of tools headed to a Wauwatosa apartment complex. Customer service staff could not find any record of the shipment in the company's system, and the discovery triggered an internal investigation. Brookfield police later received a formal theft complaint from Milwaukee Tool in April 2025.
What investigators found was a pattern stretching back more than a year. Yang created and deleted roughly 115 orders between late March 2024 and late March 2025, and court filings say he manipulated Milwaukee Tool's ordering system so those orders would be fulfilled and prepared for shipping by the warehouse without ever generating a payment. The vast majority of the orders, worth over $710,000, were placed in March 2025 alone, and the full batch of 115 orders totaled more than $1.4 million. Milwaukee Tool managed to cancel and recover six shipments, but 109 others still went out to various addresses, including Yang's own.
Casino Losses and a Ballooning Bank Account
Court filings say Yang had intimate knowledge of Milwaukee Tool's ordering system, a byproduct of the eight years he spent there — six in the customer supply chain department before transferring to IT, according to FOX6 News. That IT role, which he still held at the time of his April 2025 termination, gave him direct access to and contact with the company's legitimate customer base, and prosecutors say he deleted order information before it could reach payment processing.
Investigators traced a financial motive behind the scheme to the casino floor. Court filings cited by Industrial Equipment News show Yang visited Potawatomi Casino in Milwaukee on 140 separate days between January 2024 and June 2025, racking up $67,016.40 in losses and wagering as much as $86,318 in a single day that January. Search warrant records reviewed during the investigation showed his personal bank account balance grew from about $2,000 in 2024 to more than $130,000 by April 2025, a jump that coincided with the fraudulent shipments.
A Spreadsheet Titled 'Selling List'
A search of Yang's company laptop turned up a spreadsheet titled selling list that laid out Milwaukee Tool's retail prices, employee discount prices, and a separate column marked selling price. Investigators believed the document showed Yang was likely reselling tools in large volume rather than simply hoarding them, and it became a central piece of evidence pointing to organized commercial intent behind the theft.
The fallout reached beyond Yang's own case. The scheme forced Milwaukee Tool to temporarily shut down its employee discount purchase program in early 2025 after the company discovered how the system had been manipulated to extract commercial quantities of merchandise, cutting off a workplace perk for staff who had nothing to do with the fraud. Milwaukee Tool, headquartered in Brookfield and founded in 1924, operates as a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Techtronic Industries, which bought the toolmaker in 2005 for $626.6 million.
From Arrest to Sentencing
Yang was arrested on June 25, 2025, and posted $50,000 cash bail that August. He initially pleaded not guilty to 14 criminal counts in September 2025 before eventually reaching the plea agreement that led to Friday's sentencing. Under Wisconsin law, theft of property valued above $100,000 is charged as a Class F felony, carrying a statutory maximum of up to 12.5 years in prison and fines as high as $25,000 per count — a ceiling well above the sentence Yang ultimately received.
Hoodline first reported on the criminal complaint against Yang last August. The case fits a pattern seen elsewhere in the country, where premium power tools — Milwaukee brand products in particular — have become frequent targets for organized theft and resale operations because of steady contractor demand and the ease of flipping them on secondary online marketplaces.
