solved This week let’s discuss one of the five cases you

This week let’s discuss one of the five cases you found in working on your occupational fraud assignment.
By Wednesday, choose one of the cases you reviewed.  Please choose the most outrageous, funny, or interesting case.  At the beginning of your post, state the name of the company and fraud perpetrator, as well as a link to the case.  Please describe how one of the three elements of the fraud triangle applies to this case.  Add your thoughts and opinions.
By Sunday, explain how the two remaining elements of the fraud triangle apply to this case.  Add your thoughts and opinions.

USPS, Joseph Winstead
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/postal-worker-lied-about-jury-duty-to-goof-off/ (Links to an external site.)
Hello all,
I think we could use a little humor, and the case I chose starts like this: “Neither wind nor rain nor even ice storms kept Joseph Winstead from doing his job as a mail processor for the U.S. Postal Service in Washington. But pretending he was serving on a jury did.”
Mr. Winstead decided to take an extended vacation from his US postal job, by seizing opportunity with a jury duty invitation. While he had been selected as part of the jury on a case, he was excused later in the process, before deliberations. Instead of reporting back to his day job, he decided to pretend that he was still on the case, produced fake courthouse documentation to prove his attendance on the case, and continued collecting a salary from his employer – $31,000 in wages that he didn’t earn. He was discovered after he tried to use the same technique a second time, a few years later, but this time his supervisors got suspicious and opened an investigation. This second time, he only went as far as claiming 40 days of jury duty and collected $7000 of undeserved money. He won a steady sentence of 14 months of prison and asked to pay back $38,923.95 to the USPS.
The article doesn’t make any reference to Mr. Winstead’s financial situation or whether he was dissatisfied with his job and his pay, but we can definitely recognize the opportunity that tempted him. He would have gotten away with his “mischief” if he hadn’t used it again. To keep the tone of the article, the moral of the story is: diversify your technique.

2. Amazon: Vu Anh Nguyen
https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/05/feds-arrest-former-amazon-employee-after-company-reported-him-to-fbi-for-fraud/ (Links to an external site.)
For this particular case definitely the element of opportunity was the most obvious driving force. Mr. Nguyen was a selling support associate based in Tempe, Arizona. His job was to provide support for third party sellers and provide refunds for purchases to Amazon customers. He was charged with wire fraud as he abused his employee status to provide refunds to himself and others totaling $96,508. He was also charged with identity theft due to stealing credit card information and using name of one of the third party accounts he managed in order to purchase items for himself.
Mr. Nguyen perhaps believed that he was going to get away with issuing refunds to accounts and get away with it, as an Amazon customer I have never had trouble with getting a refund due to a defective or unsatisfied purchase, but I can’t help to imagine that all these refunds have to be audited to make sure that people or employees don’t take advantage.