A former global diversity strategist at Facebook pleaded guilty to stealing over $4 million from the company through an "elaborate scheme involving fraudulent vendors, fictitious charges, and cash kickbacks," according to federal prosecutors.
The former strategist, Barbara Furlow-Smiles, pleaded guilty to wire fraud related to the scheme, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Atlanta stated.
From 2017-2021, Furlow-Smiles led Facebook's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Facebook changed its name to Meta in October 2021.
As Facebook's lead strategist and global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement, she was responsible for developing and executing DEI initiatives. She had access to company credit cards, was able to approve invoices, and used her positions to, according to prosecutors, "cheat and defraud the company."
The Daily Wire reported that 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 to Facebook, prosecutors said.
She then submitted fraudulent expense reports to hide those charges, falsely claiming that her friends had performed work for Facebook, such as providing swag or marketing.
Those people then paid kickbacks to Furlow-Smiles, sometimes through accounts in her husband's and other people's names, prosecutors said. Sometimes the kickbacks were paid in cash in person and sometimes through the mail. Cash was hidden in a T-shirt at one point, prosecutors said. Furlow-Smiles also sometimes told her friends to pay one another to hide the scheme, prosecutors said.
Furlow-Smiles also had Facebook hire vendors operated by her friends, prosecutors said, and she approved fraudulent and inflated invoices to pay the vendors, who then paid her kickbacks.
People who were part of the scheme included friends, relatives, former interns from a prior job, nannies, babysitters, a hairstylist, and her university tutor. She had Facebook pay for several expenses of other people, including $10,000 to an artist for specialty portraits and more than $18,000 for preschool tuition, according to prosecutors.
The sentencing is scheduled for March 19, 2024. It is unclear whether the other people involved will be charged, as prosecutors said that most of them did not know that the money was coming from Facebook.
"This defendant abused a position of a trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission. Motivated by greed, she used her time to orchestrate an elaborate criminal scheme in which fraudulent vendors paid her kickbacks in cash. She even involved relatives, friends, and other associates in her crimes, all to fund a lavish lifestyle through fraud rather than hard and honest work," said U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan.
Jeremy Frankel ✉
Jeremy Frankel is a Newsmax writer reporting on news and politics.
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