Halfords Manager Who Stole £90K to Fuel Gambling Goes to Jail

The former manager of an automotive retailer in Scotland was recently sentenced to prison after stealing £90,000 ($120,000) from his employer to fuel a crippling gambling addiction. The criminal case involved a 51-year-old former manager at Halfords identified with the initials G.R.

The Embezzlement Was Completed Between 2013 and 2018

The man, who held a senior-level role with the company for years was accused of stealing from its stores in Dumbarton and Perth. The man’s downfall came after an investigation, not related to his actions, uncovered more missing funds than initially anticipated.

The 51-year-old man, who was accused of pocketing money from Halfords between January 2013 and March 2018, was recently sentenced to jail, the Mirror reports. Once the manager’s actions were uncovered, he admitted to stealing the funds. The man used a scheme that involved increasing the costs of customers’ coupons and taking cash from the stores’ registers.

For the theft of nearly $120,000 from his former employer, the 51-year-old man was sentenced to 30 months in jail. The man’s sentence was handed earlier this week by the Perth Sheriff Court. During the hearing of the case, the court heard that the man suffered from a gambling addiction from an early age and that he used some of the stolen money to fuel his addiction.

Sheriff Alison McKay acknowledged the seriousness of the 51-year-old’s unlawful activities that have been ongoing for five years. McKay added: “That is a significant breach of trust,” explaining that while restitution was one option, in this case, time behind bars was certainly considered as a part of the punishment.

An Unrelated Internal Investigation Uncovered Unusually High Safe Balances

The downfall of the manager came after an internal investigation into a non-related issue about missing funds. The probe initially uncovered a significantly higher missing sum, some £178,000 ($237,000), but in the end it was confirmed that the actions of the former manager resulted in losses of £90,000 ($120,000).

The investigation required store managers to report the balances of their safes. Two of the stores that had unusually high balances were locations managed by the 51-year-old manager, the company’s Perth and Dumbarton venues.

This ultimately helped uncover that the man used a large number of fraudulent coupons that helped him snatch the difference in cash from the registers. In some cases, the man used money from the safe to ensure that the balance of the register always matched. However, this ultimately resulted in the unusually high balances of the safes which was noticed by the internal investigation.

The lawyer representing the 51-year-old man admitted that his client suffered from gambling addiction from an early age. Reportedly, the man’s first bet was when he was 13.