Former employee given prison sentence for theft
A Westmoreland County man was sentenced to state prison in Butler County Court on Tuesday, after being charged with stealing nearly $700,000 from his former employer.
Craig M. Hone, 53, of New Kensington, was sentenced to 1 to 2 years in a state correctional facility by Judge William Shaffer. His parole will be followed by 200 months of state probation. He was ordered pay court costs and $696,968 in restitution, and complete 250 hours of community service.
Hone pleaded guilty to felony theft by deception.
State police filed the charge after Hone was accused of stealing nearly $700,000 from Cygnus Manufacturing — where he worked for more than 10 years — by submitting more than 200 fraudulent invoices.
During his employment, police said, Hone was responsible for purchasing, receiving, shipping, inventory management and production scheduling.
In his capacity with the business, according to court documents, Hone had the “ability to generate purchase orders, receive inventory from purchase orders and perform the receipt of inventory into the system and perform inventory adjustments within the system to write-off inventory items.”
Investigators said Hone submitted bogus invoices to the company between June 2009 and July 2016. He also created a fraudulent vendor, Tailored World Travel, for products that were never received. Tailored World Travel was a “personal company” that Hone started, said police. The company, however, provided no goods or services, and police could find no record of it short of a post office box and bank accounts.
The scheme was discovered after an October 2016 internal analysis. A search warrant of banking information turned up copies of checks issued by Cygnus to Tailored World Travel.
Representatives from Cygnus were in court Tuesday, but made no statements before the sentencing.
Hone apologized “to my family and friends, and to my employer.”
“I am prepared to serve my punishment, and upon release do my best to repair the relationships I have damaged,” he said. “I want to make amends to my employer to the best of my ability.”
