Home Depot Employee Stole $4M in Gift Cards to Fund ‘Extravagant Gambling Lifestyle’

• Former Home Depot employee stole 8,325 company gift cards
• $4 million scheme funded gambling
• A Secret Service investigation led to a federal prison sentence

A former employee of The Home Depot has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison for stealing and activating more than $4 million in company gift cards, according to federal prosecutors.

Felecia Ingram, of Covington, Ga., used most of the proceeds of the scheme to fund a “gambling lifestyle,” which prosecutors described as “extravagant.” In a first, the case was investigated by both the US Department of Homeland Security (Secret Service) and the Home Depot’s gift card team.

Ingram had been employed by the company as a gift card sales associate since 2008. During the pandemic, while many employees were newly experiencing the joys of working from home, the 53-year-old spent her days at the Home Depot Support Center, diligently looting the company’s gift card stash.

8.3K Cards Flipped for Cash

Her scheme involved simply walking out with stacks of physical cards – over 8,300 of them – which were taken over a 16-month period from March 2020 to July 2021.

Using her employee credentials, she then activated the cards in the system by creating fake “corporate event” orders to make the charges look legitimate, before deleting those bogus orders so the books looked nice and tidy.

Once the cards were live, she allegedly flipped them on the black market for cash.

The fraud unraveled when the Home Depot’s gift card team identified a yawning chasm in the gift card ledger balances. The investigation determined that, in all, Ingram had stolen 8,325 cards with a total value of $4,085,043.

‘Paying for Her Crimes’

“Exploiting her position for personal gain, this criminal thought she could use her knowledge of her employer’s business practices to conceal a multi-million-dollar fraud scheme,” said Robert Donovan, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the United States Secret Service Atlanta Field Office.

“Thanks to the tireless work of our agents, cooperation from the Home Depot, and the skill of the prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office, she will spend the next three years in prison paying for her crimes,” he added.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Home Depot said the company was moving on. “We’re pleased to put this matter behind us so we can remain focused on doing the right thing and serving our customers,” they said.