Friday 13th November, 2015

A former employee of global security and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin and his sister were investigated and arrested by the US State Attorney in Florida for defrauding the company out of $1.4 million.

Timothy Brown, was hired in 2007 by Lockheed Martin's Accounts Payable department based in Lakeland, Florida.

In 2012, the company changed over to a new system and Brown was assigned to reconcile old accounts that remained open.

In September an audit at Lockheed Martin uncovered the fraud, and the State Attorney's investigators were called in.

The investigation revealed that Brown diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of ‘vendor payments’ to two personal bank accounts; one at Wells Fargo in his name and one at the Bank of America in his sister, Christine Forrester.

While working, Brown would seek out accounts where no invoice was received and generate an internal invoice to fill in the gap. But rather than go to the company, the money would be sent to his personal bank accounts. Brown was able to accomplish this through the system by specifically choosing vendors that already banked with Wells Fargo and Bank of America. All he did was swap out the vendor account numbers.

In total, Brown switched the account numbers for 37 different vendors and conducted 110 individual monetary transactions, sometimes several on the same day, ranging from $79.35 to $84,090.