One woman stole $100 million from the Army and no one noticed for six years.
Civilian finance manager at Fort Sam Houston faked electronic signatures of superiors to fund a fraudulent "youth development" company; used cash to buy real estate and exotic cars.
Janet Mello, 57, took more than $100 million from US taxpayers1 by pretending to run a kind of after school development organization for military kids.
According to the indictment, the Army civilian allegedly carried out the scheme by regularly submitting fraudulent paperwork as early as December 2016 that indicated a bogus business she controlled, named Child Health and Youth Lifelong Development, was entitled to money from the 4-H Military Partnership Grant program, a collaboration “to provide meaningful youth development opportunities for military-connected children.”
I was first alerted to this by another Substack writer,
who included this snippet in his discussion of how weirdly the nation is going off the rails:One of the signs of where we are is the extraordinary recent arrest of a civilian employee of the US Army, Janet Yamanaka Mello, in Texas. Mello, a finance manager at Fort Sam Houston, allegedly stole $100 million from the federal government before anyone noticed, and used the money to build a ludicrous empire of mansions all over the country. The IRS caught her, because they noticed her buying luxury estates with no noticeable source of nine-figure income. But get this: Mello billed the government for youth services for six years, and did so without ever providing any youth services. She made up a program, and successfully billed ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, yes I’m shouting, for the fake thing. But the military didn’t catch her on the stealing end; the IRS caught her on the spending end. If she’d quietly moved the money offshore without making high-profile purchases, she might have gotten away with it.
More simply: The United States government paid $100 million for services that it never received, and did so without noticing.
This woman started this in 2016 and kept at it until caught. It’s a wild bummer that our government functions so poorly that no one in the Amry responsible for this budget line items noticed for 6+ years that no kids were being “developed.” The Army never noticed; it took the IRS to realized that Janet bought a fleet of exotic cars and mansions around the country with no discernable source of funds. Now that she has been caught, the taxpayers are going to spend more money to prosecute and - hopefully - imprison her.
Mello is charged with five counts of mail fraud, four counts of engaging in a monetary transaction over $10,000 using criminally derived proceeds and one count of aggravated identity theft, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.
If convicted, Mello faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each fraud charge, up to 10 years in prison for each spending statute charge and a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for the aggravated identity theft charge.
What a world we live in. Just wow.
Thanks for that Christopher. So much theft of our money going on they can't keep track of it. The ultimate game of whack-a-mole.
Thanks Christopher
You work your whole fing life, pretty straight shooter, stay out of trouble,bring good to society, follow the rules, and then you read about something like this.
How about an audit every year? The Office of Defense? A lot cheaper to hire some forensic accountants.One Hundred Million Dollars cheaper!
Thats about $1,340,000M Canadian
Just saying...