Product manager stole $250,000 worth of PC hardware, jailed for three years — perps sold pilfered gear on eBay

UK-Based PC Builder Chillblast
(Image credit: Chillblast)

A UK-based System Integrator Chillblast product manager was caught stealing nearly $250,000 (£200,000) worth of PC hardware over several years and then selling it on Gumtree and eBay. The company's product manager, with the help of a former employee, pulled off the heist. Both were found guilty in court today, where they were awarded for their efforts with a jail term. 

The dynamic duo sold up to thirty laptops, ten desktop systems, fifty graphics cards, and a large number of storage drives & monitors. The heist occurred during the pandemic and the bitcoin mining boom, so many of these components, especially the graphics cards, could have easily sold above retail pricing.

The Saga of a Seven-Year Embezzlement

Matthew Hudson, now obviously a former employee of the company, was in cahoots with a former employee, 32-year-old Daniel Key. Because he was able to exploit the trust of his colleagues due to his position and access to inventory checklists and customer returns, he was able to get away with it for seven years, from 2013 until 2019. Daniel Key helped Hudson sell these stolen goods and split the profits from their sales.

It took several years for the scheme to be uncovered, as Hudson was very good at hiding his tracks on paper until 2019. Hudson manipulated stock levels, stole items from custom returns, and made new items in the inventory unavailable by showing items as returned and credited. However, an employee spotted a special notebook only the company could have had in stock, listed for sale on Gumtree. Benedict Miles, Chillblast's managing director, was made aware of this. He got Key's address from the Gumtree listing and compared the product's serial number with his inventory list, and they matched.

The next day, Hudson was suspended but attempted a not-very-clean getaway by offering a resignation letter without prejudice and reimbursement for the stolen goods. Chillblast rejected the lowball offer and demanded the return of the work laptop. A Chillblast employee probed his laptop before the hard drive could be returned to him for privacy reasons, finding more incriminating evidence as it contained his phone backup, thus exposing the criminal operation. 

Hudson and Key were arrested in 2019 but weren't charged by the police until 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues between the Crown Prosecution Service and the Dorset Police. Hudson was finally sentenced to jail for three years and eight months on December 7th. He'll serve half the sentence in prison while the remainder will be served on license (parole). On December 9th, his accomplice, Daniel Key, was sentenced to two years in prison after being found responsible for selling about £109,000 worth of stolen goods.

Though Key was unemployed, Mathew Hudson held a respectable position in the company until he was caught. The total estimated worth of the stolen goods is roughly $250,960, of which Daniel sold $136,773 worth of inventories. Assuming an even split between the two, he flushed his career for $182,570, which averages to about $26,082 over seven years. 

Roshan Ashraf Shaikh
Contributing Writer

Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom's Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.

  • bit_user
    Even if I pull something out of the trash pile, at work, I would never sell it on ebay. It looks bad, and just isn't worth it.
    Reply
  • 4745454b
    I wonder what he was making as a manager? Was $30k/yr extra worth that? Getting caught means you want her hired doing anything like that. Not worth it in my book.
    Reply
  • kjfatl
    We had something similar happen where I worked. An employee was finally caught on video and had stolen over $250K worth of disk drives. The company, adverse of lawsuits and bad publicity chose to simply fire the individual who moved on to a job as manager of a large auto parts store, responsible for all inventory.
    This happened around 2005 in the USA.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    kjfatl said:
    An employee was finally caught on video and had stolen over $250K worth of disk drives. The company, adverse of lawsuits and bad publicity chose to simply fire the individual who moved on to a job as manager of a large auto parts store, responsible for all inventory.
    What's weird about this is that employers will want to see an employment history and will contact your previous employers to confirm you worked in the role you stated, for the specified dates, and confirm the terms of your departure (layoff, quit, or fired with cause). I'm not sure how much else they're legally allowed to disclose - probably worth looking into!

    I guess either the employee didn't list that job on their resume, or the new employer didn't follow up. Not listing a job will leave a large gap in your resume, and employers really don't like those.

    IMO, they should've gone for a criminal prosecution. That amount of theft is way too big to overlook, and conviction would leave them with a criminal record. Employers usually do criminal background checks, which would turn up such a conviction.

    Remember folks: the cost of theft is placed on the backs of everyone else. If you're honest, it's not in your interest to turn a blind eye to any kind of theft or fraud. If you're dishonest, no crime is harmless or else it wouldn't be a crime.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    kjfatl said:
    This happened around 2005 in the USA.
    Is the author based in the UK? Just curious, since he's new. The article seems well-written, which I appreciate.
    Reply
  • kjfatl
    bit_user said:
    What's weird about this is that employers will want to see an employment history and will contact your previous employers to confirm you worked in the role you stated, for the specified dates, and confirm the terms of your departure (layoff, quit, or fired with cause). I'm not sure how much else they're legally allowed to disclose - probably worth looking into!

    I guess either the employee didn't list that job on their resume, or the new employer didn't follow up. Not listing a job will leave a large gap in your resume, and employers really don't like those.

    IMO, they should've gone for a criminal prosecution. That amount of theft is way too big to overlook, and conviction would leave them with a criminal record. Employers usually do criminal background checks, which would turn up such a conviction.

    Remember folks: the cost of theft is placed on the backs of everyone else. If you're honest, it's not in your interest to turn a blind eye to any kind of theft or fraud. If you're dishonest, no crime is harmless or else it wouldn't be a crime.
    In the US, or at least in Georgia, all an employer can report to another employer is that you worked for them during a particular time and your wages were close to what you told the next employer. Anything else opens up the former employer to law suits. To protect themselves, this is often done through a 3rd party service. In particular, if they report you were let go "with cause" a good lawyer can get make a tidy sum and share it with the former employee.

    The former employee was not convicted. The judge threw out the case because it was the first time the employee was caught.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    kjfatl said:
    The former employee was not convicted. The judge threw out the case because it was the first time the employee was caught.
    That's hard to believe. If I had a specific interest in the matter, I'd delve deeper. If that were the real reason it was dismissed, I'd suspect the judge was bribed or blackmailed.

    I think $5k is the threshold for grand larceny. If it were $250, maybe it could be thrown out, but not $250k!

    Even $250 - if you walked out of a store with that much merchandise in 2005, you'd have almost certainly gotten slapped with a misdemeanor - not let off clean!
    Reply
  • parkerthon
    bit_user said:
    What's weird about this is that employers will want to see an employment history and will contact your previous employers to confirm you worked in the role you stated, for the specified dates, and confirm the terms of your departure (layoff, quit, or fired with cause). I'm not sure how much else they're legally allowed to disclose - probably worth looking into!

    I guess either the employee didn't list that job on their resume, or the new employer didn't follow up. Not listing a job will leave a large gap in your resume, and employers really don't like those.

    IMO, they should've gone for a criminal prosecution. That amount of theft is way too big to overlook, and conviction would leave them with a criminal record. Employers usually do criminal background checks, which would turn up such a conviction.

    Remember folks: the cost of theft is placed on the backs of everyone else. If you're honest, it's not in your interest to turn a blind eye to any kind of theft or fraud. If you're dishonest, no crime is harmless or else it wouldn't be a crime.
    This last part is sadly very much not true especially if you believe in liberty. Many laws are based on warped ideas of governance defined by the few with power that attempt to control individual lives. There are many laws that don’t really prevent harm to anyone especially if you don’t feel things isolated to self harm should be illegal. Theft however is pretty cut and dry. Additionally, as I tell my kids, just because I disagree with a law doesn’t mean I should break or disregard it. There are risks and consequences that are simply not worth it just to prove a point. Laws exist to prevent anarchy and citizens don’t get the luxury to think they don’t apply to them. They have to try and change them.
    Reply