Plenty of people have committed the occasional boner when filing expense reports, but it’s rarely bad enough that federal agents have to get involved.
Federal authorities indicted John David Berrett on five counts of wire fraud after Berrett spent $476,000 on sex toys, presents and tokens for Web-based sex workers and strippers, the St. Louis Business Journal reported.
Berrett, a 40-year old resident of Gilbert, Arizona, who worked for the St. Louis-based company World Wide Technology, is alleged to have falsified several expense reports he filed with the company from Sept. 16, 2013 to Oct. 21, 2014. He has since been fired.
A spokesperson for Berrett’s employer declined to comment on the matter, saying it could not comment on an ongoing legal investigation but that it was cooperating fully with the authorities.
While his expense report entries suggested he'd had been purchasing equipment, buying training materials and wining and dining company clients, Berrett had actually been spending thousands of dollars buying tokens on myfreecams.com, a site where visitors watch male and female performers strip and perform sex acts; visitors use the tokens to “tip” or compensate the site’s performers. The federal indictment accuses Berrett of tipping performers 2,200 times, spending more than $100,000 in the process.
In addition to the tokens, Berrett allegedly lavished gifts on a number of the site’s strippers, including things like chocolates, flowers, shoes, wine, a handbag as well as electronics, including a television, a laptop, an iPod, a digital piano and headphones.
On another occasion, Berrett sent one performer $27,000 -- money that was supposed to go toward the performer’s college tuition, a new set of tires and her parents’ utility bill.
He also spent $130 on a sex toy described as one of the world’s “top selling pleasure products,” but billed the company for training materials.
The maximum sentence for a single act of wire fraud is 20 years in prison.
Federal authorities indicted John David Berrett on five counts of wire fraud after Berrett spent $476,000 on sex toys, presents and tokens for Web-based sex workers and strippers, the St. Louis Business Journal reported.
Berrett, a 40-year old resident of Gilbert, Arizona, who worked for the St. Louis-based company World Wide Technology, is alleged to have falsified several expense reports he filed with the company from Sept. 16, 2013 to Oct. 21, 2014. He has since been fired.
A spokesperson for Berrett’s employer declined to comment on the matter, saying it could not comment on an ongoing legal investigation but that it was cooperating fully with the authorities.
While his expense report entries suggested he'd had been purchasing equipment, buying training materials and wining and dining company clients, Berrett had actually been spending thousands of dollars buying tokens on myfreecams.com, a site where visitors watch male and female performers strip and perform sex acts; visitors use the tokens to “tip” or compensate the site’s performers. The federal indictment accuses Berrett of tipping performers 2,200 times, spending more than $100,000 in the process.
In addition to the tokens, Berrett allegedly lavished gifts on a number of the site’s strippers, including things like chocolates, flowers, shoes, wine, a handbag as well as electronics, including a television, a laptop, an iPod, a digital piano and headphones.
On another occasion, Berrett sent one performer $27,000 -- money that was supposed to go toward the performer’s college tuition, a new set of tires and her parents’ utility bill.
He also spent $130 on a sex toy described as one of the world’s “top selling pleasure products,” but billed the company for training materials.
The maximum sentence for a single act of wire fraud is 20 years in prison.
