Robert Curry, a 41-year-old former Microsoft manager, has been sentenced to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay $459,341 in restitution for engaging in a scheme to defraud the software giant.
The Seattle resident also was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
Here’s more on the scheme that Curry concocted from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle:
A highly regarded and well-paid professional, with an MBA from Yale, CURRY claims he began the fraud scheme in 2010 when he was disillusioned with Microsoft because of an abusive manager. CURRY convinced one of the vendors he supervised to bill Microsoft for audio equipment he said had been purchased for X-Box 360 promotional events. In fact CURRY had purchased the equipment for his own use. Later, CURRY used the third party vendor to bill Microsoft for downloads of Microsoft’s search engine software. The third party later discovered that the download information was fraudulent, and that the money was passing into companies controlled by CURRY or his friends. Before the scheme was discovered, CURRY tried to embezzle an additional $1.3 million from Microsoft. In all CURRY defrauded Microsoft out of $459,341.
Federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum that the crime was serious “because of the careful efforts that Mr. Curry took to manipulate third parties, forge documents, and set up a shell company in a manner that indicated that he intended to continue to exploit his employer for as long as possible and for as much as possible.”
Earlier this month, Randal Ray Seal, a 54-year-old former analyst in Microsoft’s accounts payable department, was sentenced to two years in prison and two years of supervised release for stealing more than $1 million from the company.
