Lexington man guilty of million-dollar scam to steal from Columbia dumpster company
A Lexington man pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $1 million from a national dumpster company based out of Columbia, the U.S. Attorney said Tuesday.
William Tye Grisel used his position with Big Red Box, a waste management company, to defraud the company by charging it for marketing calls he did not make, Sherri Lydon said in a news release.
As an IT manager, the 39-year-old had access to company networks and credit cards, and embezzled approximately $1,050,000 from Big Red Box, according to the release.
Grisel’s scam involved creating a company, Local List, that produced no work but claimed the work generated by other research companies as its own, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.
The “fictitious” company, that used Grisel’s father’s address in Texas as its base, billed Big Red Box for the million-plus from 2014-2017, according to an indictment.
The Lexington man left Big Red Box in March 2016 to start another company, G5 marketing, which continued to falsely bill the dumpster company’s call center for $1,600 per month, according to the release.
After being investigated by the U.S. Secret Service, Grisel pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.
He will be sentenced at a later date, but Grisel was originally indicted on 153 counts, where he faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison for each wire fraud charge, and five years for each fraud charge involving a computer, according to Lydon’s office.
Big Red Box, co-founded by childhood friends Coley Brown Jr. and Chris Dorsey in 2005, rents dumpsters and hauls refuse, The State reported.
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This story was originally published November 12, 2019 at 1:51 PM.
