Woman lands in jail for defrauding 3 consecutive employers

A woman in Ontario will serve time behind bars after she defrauded and stole from three consecutive employers.

Erica Coughlin, 40, pleaded guilty to four charges, including theft over $5,000 and fraud under $5,000, on Thursday, according to a report.

At the Ontario Court of Justice in St. Catharines, Judge Fergus O’Donnell agreed to a joint submission by the Crown and defence and imposed a sentence of 12 months in custody, followed by probation for three years.

However, Coughlin was sentenced to just over six months in prison as she was given credit for the amount of time she had spent in pretrial custody, noted the Niagara Falls Review.

“I am going to accept the joint submission, it’s a fair sentence, but I think you should understand it could be longer, and still be fair,” O’Donnell told Coughlin, according to the report.

Saskatchewan lost thousands of dollars to a number of employee fraud and theft incidents that were reported earlier this year.

Woman’s crimes revealed

Coughlin was convicted of fraud in 2019. That resulted from her being caught for stealing a chequebook from the St. Catherines auto body shop where she worked as a clerk. She attempted to pay her outstanding balance at a payday loan store using one of the stolen cheques, according to the Niagara Falls Review.

In June 2020, Coughlin was hired as an office assistant at Niagara Dermatology Centre. Soon after her hiring, she began to make fraudulent returns on the employer’s business account to her personal accounts, according to the report.

The employer discovered the frauds in January 2021 and reported the incident to the Niagara Regional Police. An investigation by the police’s central fraud unit found that Coughlin stole more than $55,500 from the St. Catharines clinic.

In June 2021, not long after starting her employment at Carlton Dental in St. Catharines, she made 14 payments of just more than $1,500 from its business account to her own account, according to the report.

Her next employer, Advantage Plus Collision Centre, also reported to the police after they discovered that Coughlin had made a number of unauthorized transactions on a business credit card. The total loss to the company was just more than $900, according to the report.

Coughlin is also currently wanted in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island on outstanding warrants for fraud.

Previously, two female employees of a lottery retail outlet in Ontario were arrested and are facing charges for their alleged involvement in claiming of a prize from a stolen winning ticket.