The former president and co-owner of a Cleveland plumbing supply company is accused of siphoning more than $5 million from the business through fake invoices, phantom sales and even a swap of company products for work on his lake house. John Siefert, of Highland Heights, was charged Wednesday in federal court with two counts of wire fraud and one count of filing a false tax return.
Siefert agreed to waive grand jury proceedings, a charging process that, according to Cleveland.com, typically signals a defendant intends to plead guilty. He held the roles of president, board member and second-largest owner at WinSupply of Cleveland, a wholesale seller of specialized plumbing products that is part of the nationwide WinSupply Inc. family of companies. His attorney, Justin Withrow, declined to comment on the charges.
Fake Invoices Tied to His Own Real Estate Company
Prosecutors allege Siefert stole $4.3 million through a fake-invoice scheme routed through EGS Realty LLC, his own real estate company, which leased WinSupply of Cleveland's building on Hinckley Industrial Parkway and most recently charged the company $14,900 a month in rent. According to the same cleveland.com report, Siefert created more than 100 fake EGS invoices for services, products and expenses supposedly tied to that lease, and WinSupply paid them. Some of the phony invoices billed the company more than $100,000 for septic tank equipment and grinders, prosecutors say.
A second scheme allegedly netted Siefert $881,000 by entering sales for products that customers never actually ordered. The inflated sales figures directly affected his bonuses, the outlet reports, and the fictitious orders were later marked as returned once those bonuses had been paid out.
A Lake House Paid for in Plumbing Supplies
Prosecutors also allege Siefert gave $26,060 worth of WinSupply products to a landscaping company in exchange for work performed on his lake house. On top of the theft allegations, he's accused of failing to report income from the schemes, which prosecutors say reduced the taxes he owed by $1.5 million between 2021 and 2024.
Prosecutors say the theft ran from 2021 to 2025, though a separate civil lawsuit filed by WinSupply accuses Siefert of carrying out the schemes beginning in 2018 — a discrepancy the cleveland.com report notes between the two proceedings without resolving it.
Customers Flagged Returns That Never Happened
The scheme started to unravel in January 2025, when company officials began investigating Siefert after noticing an unusually high number of customer returns. Customers told auditors they had never ordered the supplies listed in WinSupply's records and said they had not actually returned products they had purchased.
Once confronted, Siefert confessed the schemes to company officials, according to the lawsuit, and was fired. WinSupply then reported him to law enforcement. The company's civil case against Siefert was filed electronically on March 14, 2025, per Trellis, and the lawsuit states it has been on hold since December while the criminal investigation continued.
