One guy was caught doing that to the tune of $100 million to Facebook and Google. If he had stopped at $1 million or something he probably would have got away with it. I suspect others have.
I was reading this whole thread flabbergasted and wondering "where the hell are people working that this happened" when it hit me:
I did work in a place where a manager was invoicing monthly "external design work" to the company to the tune of 5x his own salary, because the company's designer was "overwhelmed".
In the end he was just paying the hired designer a little extra to drag her feet and paying a Fiverr freelancer to do some cheap mockups with Figma. And obviously cashin' in the rest.
I only found out about several months after I left. It was interesting for me to have all this revealed because this guy was actively working to undermine all other engineering teams, with gossip and by blocking work. I didn't interact much with him or at all, but he was part of why I left.
The fun part: he was only fired a few months after the BOARD ITSELF fired the CTO, CPO and CEO all in the same day.
The company was 90 employees when I joined, 900 when I left, zero in 2024, and now was sold for scrap to a micro-sized competitor.
I wish I was a writer because the stories I have of that place would be an amazing book.
How was he caught? Involving the internal designer seems like a huge mistake. Keeping the scam quiet without collaborators or actively rocking the boat could have probably persisted for a long time.
The CFO had raised it as a problem but nobody ever bothered to check.
When a new CTO started, he actually checked it out on his first week and discovered the company emitting invoices belonged to the PM.
The CTO also demanded talking with the designer from Fiverr and in the end the amount of money actually paid to him was negligible.
I never really understood the involvement of the internal designer but she was also fired on the spot together with the PM and the company's highest paid engineer (but I don't think this one is involved).
I can say that the people we hired from HubSpot were 100% frat-house-boys so I 100% believe it.
But back to the company I worked, there were very stupid shit going on:
Around #MeToo, there was a group meeting with all men in the company because of fears of sexual harassment issues. Nobody close to me had any idea about the root cause, and there were some very strangely sexist comments in the meeting. Some people (including one later fired for non-sexual harassment) made it a personal soapbox and went into rants. The CEO completely mishandled it.
Also there was once an anonymous blog about the practices of the company that was totally blown out of proportion by management, and all employees had to attend a meeting to talk about it. Once again the CEO mishandled it, first by paying any attention and second for being incredibly awkward and super-defensive.
This was the main reason the CEO was ousted.
After I left the company there was a string of CEOs that acqui-hired all the competitors and basically drained the company's coffers. And of course the over-hiring, getting to 900 people on a pyramid scheme.
I forgot to tell the main product the company made: SEO blogspam. Yep.
Last year it collapsed because of our mutual friend, ChatGPT.
