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Miami Herald

Bookkeeper steals $1.6M from SC company, gets caught while on vacation, feds say

A small South Carolina business learned its longtime bookkeeper had been stealing from the company while she was on vacation, leading to her firing followed by a federal investigation, prosecutors said. While working part time for SSRC Inc. in Duncan, Jennifer L. Bengston Cook, 56, of Greer, defrauded the manufacturing company of more than $1.6 million from about December 2014 through June 2024, according to court documents. Now, a federal judge has sentenced Cook to three years in prison after she pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of South Carolina said in a June 23 news release. In sentencing Cook, the judge also ordered her to pay $2,276,830.09 in restitution, prosecutors said. Defense attorneys Christopher Shannon Leonard and Joshua Snow Kendrick, who were retained by Cook, did not return McClatchy News' request for comment June 23. In Cook's indictment, prosecutors wrote she 'would use SSRC's bank account to pay her personal credit card bills' and 'would pay herself additional compensation without authorization' over approximately 10 years. She wrote multiple checks to herself and deposited them into her bank account, prosecutors said. Cook tried covering up her yearslong theft by listing checks as 'void' in SSRC's ledger or in QuickBooks, a bookkeeping system used by the business, according to prosecutors. Other times, Cook would record the checks in QuickBooks as 'paid to other employees' or vendors, prosecutors said. Cook would sometimes list 'payroll' on the memo lines of checks and would occasionally give herself three payroll checks in one pay period, the U.S Attorney's Office said. The theft was detected when Cook's supervisor looked into the company's financial records, in search of a vendor payment, while she was vacationing, according to prosecutors. 'After the discovery, Cook's employment was terminated, and law enforcement was notified,' prosecutors said. SSRC, which makes theatrical products for distribution, did not return McClatchy News' request for comment June 24. The Spartanburg County business was established in 1987.