Crime Diversity exec scams Facebook, Nike out of millions in elaborate fraud scheme - After being fired by Facebook for stealing $5 million, she was hired by Nike where she stole another $120k

Furlow-Smiles also caused Facebook to onboard several vendors that were owned and operated by friends and associates who paid her kickbacks and she approved fraudulent invoices for these vendors.​

Ari Hoffman
May 16, 2024



A former diversity program manager at Facebook and Nike has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for stealing over $5 million through an elaborate scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fictitious paperwork, and cash kickbacks.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, of Marietta, Georgia, served as Lead Strategist, Global Head of Employee Resource Groups and Diversity Engagement at Facebook, now known as Meta. From January 2017 to September 2021 she led Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at Facebook and was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives, operations, and engagement programs.

According to US Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan, Furlow-Smiles had access to company credit cards and the authority to submit purchase requisitions and approve invoices for authorized vendors of Facebook. She used her position to cheat and defraud the company by causing Facebook to pay numerous individuals for goods and services that were never provided and got kickbacks from those individuals, often in cash.

Furlow-Smiles linked PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App accounts to her Facebook credit cards and used those accounts to pay friends, relatives, and others for goods and services that were never provided. She concealed the bogus charges by submitting fraudulent expense reports, falsely claiming that her associates or their businesses had performed work on programs and events for Facebook when they had not done so.

After these individuals received the payments from Facebook, they returned the majority of the money to Furlow-Smiles, paying the kickbacks in cash and through account transfers to others, including her husband. She also directed them to pay each other and the people she owed money to conceal her involvement.

According to the FBI, Furlow-Smiles also caused Facebook to onboard several vendors that were owned and operated by friends and associates who paid her kickbacks and she approved fraudulent invoices for these vendors. After Facebook paid the invoices, Furlow-Smiles had the vendors return a portion of the money they received to her.

Furlow-Smiles recruited friends, relatives, former interns from a prior job, nannies, babysitters, a hair stylist, and her university tutor to participate in the scheme. Some of the charges Furlow-Smiles caused Facebook to pay included almost $10,000 to an artist for specialty portraits and over $18,000 to a preschool for tuition.

After she was terminated from Facebook, she went to work for Nike from November 2021 to February 2023 as the Senior Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, responsible for supporting DEI initiatives, developing strategies, and hosting DEI events including a Juneteenth event in New York.

Furlow-Smiles enacted the same vendor scheme to defraud Nike by linking her corporate card to her PayPal and Venmo accounts which she used to pay her associates, causing fraudulent charges to her Nike card. According to the Justice Department, Furlow-Smiles stole over $4.9 million from Facebook and over $120,000 from Nike to fund a luxury lifestyle in California, Georgia, and Oregon.

Buchanan said in a statement, “Furlow-Smiles shamelessly violated her position of trust as a DEI executive at Facebook to steal millions from the company utilizing a scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fake invoices, and cash kickbacks. After being terminated from Facebook, she brazenly continued the fraud as a DEI leader at Nike, where she stole another six-figure sum from their diversity program. Her prison sentence reflects the consequences of her decision to orchestrate an intricate scheme to defraud two of her employers for personal profit.”

Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta added, “As Lead Strategist at Facebook, Furlow-Smiles’ employer put an extreme amount of trust in her, only to have that trust completely violated. After she was fired, she carelessly continued her fraudulent schemes at Nike, thinking she was untouchable. As a result, she not only threw away a lucrative career but will serve time behind bars for her excessive greed.”

Furlow-Smiles was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Steven D. Grimberg to five years and three months in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $4,981,783.58 in restitution to Facebook and $121,054.50 to Nike, for a total of $5,102,838.08. Furlow-Smiles previously pled guilty to wire fraud on December 11, 2023.

Source (Archive)

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

As for why she had access to the company cards for that much spending and could do all these money transfers...

It's probably because a big portion of that "job" is finding other race grifters to hire for various seminars and workshops, and they probably get paid through those types of transfers via Paypal, etc.

You tell Facebook it's for a training on white guilt by a specialist, but the money actually goes to your kid's preschool or whatever else.

 

[Balr0g]

Niggers gonna Nigeria you no matter where they go

 

[LavenderMenace]

Ya know what? I’d do the same. Fuck corps who soullessly pander to minorities and fags.

This woman is actually intelligent and crafty.

 

[glass_houses]

This woman is actually intelligent and crafty.

Not really. It's a very simple scheme, and it's difficult to pull off in a healthy organisation. It says a lot more about Facebook than about her in that she got away with it for so long. If she had wits she would have vanished overseas when Facebook fired her, transferred the cash to Bitcoin, and assumed a new identity. Instead she just got another job, did exactly the same thing, and got caught much sooner because Nike makes its money exploiting niggers in pretty much every capacity and there was no way in hell they'd let it go the other way around.

She's a generic narcissist, right down to not grasping that to be an effective con artist over the long term, she needs to switch both the con and herself up. If it weren't for the Summer of Love, she wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as she did. Con artists who are good at what they do don't need to hide behind DEI and incompetent managers, and they also know when they need to leave town for good.

 

[mister fireworks]

This isnt THAT wild in terms of "how did she get away with it", but its funny how ungodly cucked fbook is that they didn't press charges against her, considering the dollar value. If anything, the value of some sort of suit/criminal charges would protect them from looking like retards when this inevitably came out and deterring other thieves in the company.

I'm not surprised that Nike hired her either, really. Her position is "nig with other big name company experience who is expected to just kind of stand around and hopefully not waste too much money", so Nike being the arrogant idiots that they are, all bunkered away from the rest of the real big companies in Oregon, I'm frankly not surprised that nobody a) even had any contacts at fbook to call to check on her (no sane person would leave fbook for Nike to get a a 90% pay cut) b) theres no competent due diligence being done on execs because most people who work at Nike are just stupid. I know people who work in eng, finance, design there. They are not the best and brightest. Not that facebook is either, but theres a noticeable difference in capacity between the average big tech drone (non-autists) and Nike people.

When I worked at Apple a guy was arrested in the building next to mine by the feds. He had been funneling kickbacks from some Chinese company he was "managing" from the apple side into a chinese bank account and I think his wife or him or both were Chinese. Apple or the FBI had apparently figured it out and worked together to build a case against him. I dont recall the name but I believe he went to prison. But the thing is with really small transactions (sub 25k) like that on a credit card by a high ranking employee whose job is just bullshit and thus even the "legit" spend is mostly just garbage that looks questionable to any sensible person, it doesn't seem that crazy that she got away with stealing a lot of money.

The thing with execs at these companies is that they can do whatever they want unless someone above them wants them gone. I know of an exec who got canned for buying like a shit load of alcohol on a few business trips that was clearly not for business purposes, but that amount couldn't have been more than $25k total over multiple trips. But one mechanism for getting rid of an executive who everyone hates and sucks at their job without freaking people out, angering people, or opening yourself up to bad press is to just put an internal tap on them- audit all their expenses, try to see who hates them and for what, build a case against them basically. Or just wait until they do something stupid. Having the sinecure job as D&I yaass kween boss bitch or whatever probably doesnt press you up against the other heavy hitters in the company. Youre just window dressing, so you can just chill and get your nails did and embezzle and when you get fired for it eventually they will cover it up for you lol.

Counter-example: This is some Apple exec who got fired a few years ago because some random tiktocker ran up on him when he was at some gay car show. It looked like he didnt know who the guy was and just made some boomer movie reference that didnt seem that offensive in context. plus, not on company time, property, or identified as apple employee until other people recognized him. I dont think there was even a backlash to this that they had to respond to, just Boom! fired lol.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-exec-fired-big-breasted-women-joke-says-axing-mistake-2022-12

Spoiler: article on fired apple exec

Apple exec who was fired after being caught on video joking about fondling 'big-breasted women' says he stayed up all night trying to get the TikTok down before it went viral

Spoiler: article on fired apple exec

• A former Apple exec said he spent all night trying to remove a TikTok in which he made a crude joke.
• In the video, Tony Blevins made a comment about fondling "big-breasted women."
• Apple fired Blevins, who'd been with the company for 22 years, over the video in September.

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Tony Blevins, a former Apple executive, told The Wall Street Journal this week that he spent all night trying to take down a TikTok featuring him making a crude comment in September.
The tech company, he said, reached out at 1:30 a.m. about the video, insisting that he get it taken down immediately.
"I race cars, play golf, and fondle big-breasted women. But I take weekends and major holidays off," Blevins says in the TikTok, which shows him getting out of his Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a supercar that can cost upwards of $500,000.
The video ultimately cost Blevins his career at Apple. Blevins, a vice president of procurement who had worked at Apple for over 22 years, was fired days after it was posted. Bloomberg was the first to report that Blevins had left the company.
"It was 22 years dissolved in about 25 seconds," Blevins told The Journal, adding: "It utterly shocked me. My whole life has been Apple. I tried to be the most loyal person."
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An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication. Insider was unable to get in contact with Blevins.

The TikTok video was posted by a creator known as Daniel Mac as part of a series where he asks people with expensive cars what they do for a living.
Blevins told The Journal that the Apple executive who'd called in September told him to get the video taken down as soon as possible, saying some staffers had complained about the TikTok. Blevins said he spent the night trying to get in contact with Mac to get it taken down but didn't receive a reply.

Mac, who has 13.6 million followers on TikTok, did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication. His video of Blevins has received over 200,000 likes.
Blevins apologized for the video and said his statement was a reference to the 1981 film "Arthur." He told The Journal that he thought his firing was a mistake and was a sign of the company bowing to external pressure.

After he was fired, Apple executives planned a going-away party for Blevins, but he told The Journal it was eventually canceled. Blevins also told the publication he was let go without severance. He hasn't been replaced, he said

edit: I made a mistake when reading this. My assumption was that the investigation started at Nike and they back-traced it to fbook. I didnt read any other articles, but I think its prob more likely that fbook told the fbi after firing her and just let them slowly make their case. It would've probably saved fbook millions of dollars to openly release a statement about her firing immediately to scare all their other corp card holder embezzlers into being less brazen, but facebook would never refuse to bend over to help the FBI make their case.

 

[A Sentient Cloud]

I don't know why these DEI execs are given company credit cards, there are so many cases of abusing them to felony grand theft levels. Just in my local bumfuck county there was recently a report showing the DEI person (a taxpayer funded position) had charged something like her annual salary's worth of expenses including take-out, flights, and luxury hotel stays.