Ex-Disney World employee given lenient punishment despite fund embezzlement
An ex-Walt Disney World employee was slapped with a pair of misdemeanor charges against an allegation of fund embezzlement that amounts to $34,000. The accused woman has been fired from the resort she was employed in and has also been banned forever from working in Disney World. However, the court gave her a punishment that sounds too easy for the crime committed. Here's more.
Orlando Sentinel reports that the 53-year-old woman was fired in May 2019 after her employer proved her crime. The accused had reportedly pocketed the said amount between the period of January 2017 and May 2019 by selling MagicBands at the transportation and ticket center of Magic Kingdom. She used to take the money from customers in cash and keep it with herself.
This discrepancy in accounts increased over time to become prominent enough for Walt Disney World to realize that she had activated 1,307 more MagicBands in 2018 than what the records showed she sold. To prove the suspicion, the company then deployed fraud investigators who bought MagicBands from her twice in spring 2019 and ultimately confronted her. The accused eventually admitted to the theft.
The woman shared she has been paying extra bills with that money and sending the remaining to her mother after her father died in 2017. While the law officers felt this is big enough to be called a fraud, the state attorney disagreed. That's because, Disney, where she was employed since 1990, couldn't prove how they arrived at the exact amount, thus obviating corpus issues.
The case records state that the woman also didn't use false pretenses to get the money. These two clauses reduced her charges from grand theft to misdemeanors. The accused was sentenced in October, in which she was also told to pay a fine of $273 and asked to attend a seminar to learn about impulse control. Further, she will be on 12-month probation.
Not just employees, customers, too, have punked Disneyland theme parks. Wedding Crashers actor Vince Vaughn, who was once a regular customer, shared on Justin Long's podcast that he used to fake identities as an assistant of Disney casting director Matt Casella to book free tickets.
