A federal jury last month convicted the owner of an independent Amazon delivery company on 30 counts of stealing nearly $10 million from the retailer through a scheme that involved fake vendors and invoices.
The women and a co-conspirator used the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) money to purchase expensive real estate and luxury cars, including a nearly $1 million home, a Lamborghini Urus, and a Porsche Panamera, the Department of Justice said in a news release on Tuesday.
According to court documents, Brittany Hudson, the owner of Legend Express LLC, which contracted with Amazon to deliver packages, used a romantic relationship with Kayricka Wortham, an operations manager at an Amazon warehouse in Smyrna, Georgia, to skim money from Amazon using bogus vendors and invoices. Wortham was a supervisor with authority to approve new Amazon vendors and invoice payments.
Wortham provided the fake vendor information to unknowing subordinates and asked them to input the information into Amazon’s vendor system. Once the information was entered, Wortham and another co-conspirator at Amazon approved the fake vendors, enabling the vendors to submit invoices.
Between January and June 2022, Hudson and Wortham then submitted fictitious invoices, falsely representing that the phony vendors had provided goods and services to Amazon. Wortham approved the invoices, causing Amazon to transfer approximately $9.4 million to bank accounts controlled by Hudson, Wortham, and other co-conspirators.
Hudson was also convicted of money laundering, lying to a franchising company while on pretrial release and forging the signature of former Chief U.S. District Judge Timonthy C. Batten, Sr., on fake court documents.
“The level of greed on the part of the perpetrators in this case was staggering,” said Special Agent in Charge Robert Donovan of the U.S. Secret Service Atlanta Field Office. “Leveraging personal relationships, she stole millions from Amazon and was so confident she wouldn’t be caught, she even forged the signature of a federal judge with the intent of defrauding a second company.
In September 2022, Hudson and Wortham were charged in federal court with defrauding Amazon. In January 2023, while on bond, they lied to a potential business partner, claiming that their Amazon-related criminal charges had been dismissed. To support that lie, the two emailed fake court documents that purported to dismiss the charges and contained the forged signatures of Judge Batten., who has since retired, and Cobb County Magistrate Judge Norman L. Barnett, who was then one of the prosecutors on the case. Hudson also emailed doctored bank statements and personal financial statements that fraudulently inflated the balances in her and Wortham’s accounts.
The jury also found that money seized from Hudson’s bank account and residence were forfeitable as fraudulent proceeds of the Amazon scheme.
Wortham, 34, pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2023 to 16 years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $9.4 million in restitution to Amazon. More than $3 million in fraudulent proceeds seized from multiple bank accounts, the Smyrna home and the vehicles were forfeited. On Oct. 6, she pleaded guilty to forgery of the signature of a federal judge. She is scheduled to be sentenced on the forgery charge on March 25.
Sentencing for Brittan Hudson, 40, is scheduled for June 16.
Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.
Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.
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