PHOTO: A woman who stole more than $850,000 from a Melbourne real estate agent has been jailed. Credit: AAP
The first time Debbie Mauger stole from her bosses at a Melbourne real estate agent it was $200.
But a few hundred dollars here and there added up over three years and Mauger was shocked not only to learn she had stolen more than $850,000 – but that she had nothing to show for it.
Except a more than three-year prison sentence, of which she must serve almost two years before becoming eligible for parole.
She was 52 and a woman with an unblemished record when she made the first illegal transfer from the company accounts she had access to as the office manager and bookkeeper for the Sandringham real estate firm in December 2016.
Mauger had held the position since 2011 and considered the company directors – one of whom has since had to delay his retirement for several years – as close friends.
She followed that first theft of $200 with more than 200 transactions over the next few years, moving sums ranging from $20 to $10,500 between two office accounts and two accounts in her own name.
Mauger used subterfuge to cover up her wrongdoing, County Court Judge Rosemary Carlin said on Friday.
Almost every illicit transfer was disguised within a groups of payments, always for larger amounts, to legitimate creditors.
She recorded false names of creditors and listed the payments as printing or advertising. She hid her account names, replacing the field with “DM”, “MetroMedia” or sometimes just “account”.
All up Mauger took $858,648.03.
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