A former global diversity executive at Facebook has pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from the company to fund a lavish lifestyle in California and Georgia, authorities said.
Barbara Furlow-Smiles, 38, pleaded guilty Monday to a federal wire fraud charge.
“This defendant abused a position of a trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan said Tuesday in a statement.
“Motivated by greed, she used her time to orchestrate an elaborate criminal scheme in which fraudulent vendors paid her kickbacks in cash. She even involved relatives, friends, and other associates in her crimes, all to fund a lavish lifestyle through fraud rather than hard and honest work.”
From January 2017 to September 2021, Furlow-Smiles led diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs at Facebook, prosecutors said. She had access to company credit cards as part of her work and had the authority to submit purchase requisitions and approve invoices for authorized Facebook vendors.
She used her position to get the social media giant, now known as Meta, to pay for goods and services that were never provided and got kickbacks in return, authorities said. She also had the company pay for things for her, including nearly $10,000 paid to an artist for specialty portraits and more than $18,000 for preschool tuition.
Authorities said Furlow-Smiles linked her company credit cards to PayPal, Venmo and Cash App accounts. She used the accounts to make bogus charges which she hid by submitting fraudulent expense reports, claiming the money went toward work on programs and events for Facebook.
Most of the people she paid did not know the funds came from Facebook, according to prosecutors. They paid most of the money back to Furlow-Smiles, sometimes in the form of cash wrapped in T-shirts or other items, officials said. Furlow-Smiles also had associates pay one another or people that she owed money to in order to hide her scheme, according to prosecutors.
Facebook onboarded vendors that were owned and operated by Furlow-Smiles’ friends and associates who paid her kickbacks, officials said. Court records show she approved fraudulent or inflated invoices to pay the vendors.
As part of the kickback scheme, she recruited friends, relatives, former interns from a previous job, nannies, babysitters, a hair stylist and her university tutor, prosecutors said. She “used lies and deceit to defraud both vendors and Facebook employees,” said Keri Farley, special-agent-in-charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office..
Furlow-Smiles is set to be sentenced in Georgia on March 19, 2024.
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