A Centreville woman has pleaded guilty to charges that she embezzled $550,000 from her former employer, a farm cooperative in Herndon. Paula Sue Leventhal, 64, pleaded guilty to the wire fraud charges in federal court last week.
Leventhal was the chief executive secretary to the cooperative’s CEO. As part of her role, she was in charge of arranging corporate travel using company credit cards.
Leventhal created a merchant account on point-of-sale platform Square in 2015, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. She used this merchant account to fraudulently charge company cards and transfer the money to her personal bank accounts.
“Leventhal disguised the transactions by changing the merchant name associated with her Square account so the charges would appear as cooperative-authorized business expenses in bank statements,” the news release said.
Between 2015 and 2022, she used her Square account to charge company cards 506 times for a total of $550,000.
While the news release did not identify the cooperative where she worked, documents tie Leventhal to the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Cooperative Association, FFXNow reported. The cooperative owns six dairy plants that process more than 3 billion pounds of milk annually, bottled and sold under the brand Maola.
Leventhal will be sentenced on May 28. She faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
