Receptionist Arrested After Failing to Inform Employer They Were Accidentally Paying Her $450K Salary for a Year, Now Facing Grand Theft & Money Laundering Charges

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Daily Mail – A Florida horse clinic mistakenly paid a receptionist with a veterinarian's checks and now the $60,000-a-year employee stands accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yessica Arrua, 29, of Wellington, was arrested on June 27 after allegedly pocketing more than $400,000 of someone else's salary.

A police report from the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office (PBSO) obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that trouble first arose in early 2023 when the Palm Beach Equine Clinic's (PBEC) CFO caught the mistake and contacted the company's payroll provider, Harbor America, to advise that it had inputted someone else's information into Arrua's account.

Arrua has been charged with grand theft of $100,000 or more and money laundering of $100,000 or more.

Arrua remains in custody at Palm Beach's Main Detention Center. 

Well that's a bummer of a situation. Obviously the responsible take to have here, the way society should ideally work, is that if you know you've been accidentally paid out more money at work than you should have been, you immediately escalate the situation to your boss so they can fix it. People make mistakes. Even third-party payroll companies. Maybe if you're really lucky, as a reward for your honesty, the person making 7x your salary who's paycheck you accidentally received will kick you some thank you money. Or at least a nice bottle of wine. I'm sure that's how this situation would typically play out. Had Yessica Arrua done the right thing, she wouldn't be facing prison time right now.

On the other hand… if I were going to argue in favor of Yessica… there's a lot of money in horses. Maybe she thought the company had a REALLY lucrative year of horse doctoring, and the owner must have decided to spread the wealth. Allegedly she had it on good authority that the previous receptionist received bonuses for saving the company money on office supplies. Maybe Yessica found a REALLY good deal on notepads, and assumed the owner was REALLY impressed with her work. 

If only she didn't fold like a cheap suit the moment she got caught. 

After Arrua allegedly collected eight to 10 months of the fraudulent direct deposit payments, the veterinarian confronted her.

Arrua 'broke down crying and admitted the criminal action', according to the police report.

If you're 8 months deep into this thing. If you've already spent the money. You've gotta have a plan in place for when the other shoe drops. You gotta be ready to play dumber than you've ever played in your life. Say you thought it was a raise. Apparently she's known the owner of the company since she was 9 years old. Just claim you thought he really liked you, and you didn't want to bring up the money because you didn't want any of your co-workers knowing you were getting special treatment. Come up with anything. You have to go down with the ship. Never surrender. It probably wouldn't have ended up mattering anyways, but if I'm that far deep into this caper, at NO POINT are you getting anything close to an admission of guilt out of me. I'm pleading ignorance to the grave, and all of the blame is being thrown at the third-party payroll company who made this whole thing possible.

Additionally… screw this vet.

The police report stated that the $450,000-a-year veterinarian - who was supposed to receive those checks - 'did not monitor her checking account and deposits for the past year', therefore she didn't notice she hadn't received her salary payments until a few of her credit cards declined.

She went a year without realizing she hadn't been paid? Not one time did she bother to pull up her Bank of America app? How is that possible? I suppose she makes enough money, and is financially frugal enough that she never has to worry about spending more than she makes. She must have auto payments set up on all of her credit cards. But after a year of ZERO dollars being deposited into her checking account, there finally wasn't enough cash on hand to cover the bill, the cards got declined, and it all came to a head.

Meanwhile, it sounds like half the money this rich vet barely noticed was missing ended up being sent by Yessica to poor families in Argentina, and to help a friend of her mom's start a food truck business.

She allegedly had used the extra money at stores including Coach, Michael Kors, furniture shops and restaurants. Thousands of dollars were also sent through Zelle to 'Mama Dukes', according to the police report.

The report also revealed $80,000 of the money was used to purchase a food truck for a friend of Arrua's mother, and Arrua also admitted to sending money to people in Argentina to build a house.

The police report said that Arrua believed the extra funds in her account was a 'bonus' for her work as a receptionist.

In response to being called out, Arrua wrote out a cashier's check for $200,000 of the estimated $414,000 she pocketed.

But she claimed she could not return the rest of the money because her mother had already sent $100,000 of it to family in Argentina. They thought it was a 'gift from God', according to the police report. 

I guess there was a bit of personal spending mixed in there too. I'm not saying what Yessica didn't wasn't blatantly wrong, but I just can't bring myself to feel bad for this vet. If you're that oblivious to your finances, you need to be taught a lesson. Imagine if a scammer got a hold of this vet's credit card number? What a mark she must be. She could have multiple families buying groceries on her dime for the rest of her life. No shot someone who takes a year to realize they haven't been paid is going to catch that. 

Tough beat, Yessica. But I bet that was a pretty awesome year. There was probably a point she really thought she might get away with it too. I wonder if something like that has every happened to an employee, and they've got off scot-free. Someone in payroll mistakenly adds a zero when onboarding a new employee, and the Collections Specialist working at Chipotle corporate makes $500k a year instead of $50k. She goes 3 years without anyone noticing, then quits overnight with enough money to retire on. I like to think somebody somewhere has gotten away with something like that before.