Yahoo Finance How the psychology of fraud drove a rising DEI star to steal more than $5 million from Meta and Nike: ‘The world is filled with Barbaras’
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A new bill against AI deepfakes is introduced in the Senate, X CEO Linda Yaccarino eyes sports docuseries, and Fortune writer Lila MacLellan dives into how a rising DEI star stole more than $5 million from Meta and Nike. Have a terrific Thursday.
- The Facebook fraudster. Barbara Furlow-Smiles was once a rising star in DEI at Facebook. Hired in 2017, she spent more than four years leading the company’s employee resource group before taking a job for more money and a bigger title at Nike, where she worked until early 2023. If you’re familiar with her name, however, it’s likely because of what she was doing in the shadows at both firms.
As I report in a recent Fortune feature, Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty last December to stealing $4.9 million from the social media giant now called Meta and taking more than $100,000 from Nike. She faces a five-year prison sentence that will begin next month. The FBI found that she had siphoned the money by setting up kickback schemes with both real and invented vendors, and by linking her personal payment apps—like PayPal and Venmo—to the corporate credit card. The fake vendors, the agents found, were friends and family who invoiced Facebook through Furlow-Smiles and then sent some of the money they “earned” back to her in cash.
Furlow-Smiles’s crimes shocked people who knew or worked with her because she was known as an exceptionally conscientious and generous person. Coworkers described her as compassionate and effective. Even after this debacle, one of her former colleagues told me, “I’d hire her.”
As it turns out, however, generosity was at least part of what brought down the former DEI manager. In a sentencing memo for the judge, her defense team depicted Furlow-Smiles as a brilliant woman who was burdened by a sense that she needed to share her wealth with her family and friends of lesser means. At one previous job, the document stated, she paid what’s known as the “Black tax” by giving out credit cards to family members. “It was ingrained in her that ‘your money is not just your money, [and] your privilege is not just your privilege,’" the lawyers wrote, quoting their client. “That meant any bonus, and any raise, belonged to the collective.”
“As I got to speak with Barbara more, I realized that the world is filled with Barbaras,” defense lawyer Lance Clarke said at the sentencing hearing.
One friend of the former Facebook manager told me that once she got past the shock of the news and learned more about what her friend had done, she thought to herself: “That’s Barbara trying to help too many people.” (To be sure, Furlow-Smiles spent some stolen money on what federal prosecutors called a “lavish lifestyle” for herself, her husband, and her young daughter.)
While her story is unique, it also fits the mold of what financial crime experts call the “fraud triangle” that enables corporate misdeeds: She felt financial pressures, had the capacity to justify taking the money, and saw an opportunity to enrich herself at a company where large amounts of money flowed and—in her telling, according to her lawyers’ sentencing memo—controls were lacking.
Read my full piece here.
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
