Over 8,000 Home Depot prepaid vouchers worth over $4 million turned out to be fraudulent
Even the biggest retailers in the country aren’t immune to fraud, and that is exactly what happened to Home Depot some years back. A recent police investigation concluded that the retailer offered 8,000 vouchers worth more than $4 million over a period of several months. However, that money was stolen by an employee, who has now been sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence for her crime, alongside being ordered to pay millions in damages to the retailer.
A report in The US Sun names the perpetrator as Felecia Ingram. Ingram used to work as a gift card sales associate at Home Depot, where she used her credentials to steal 8,325 physical gift cards from the Store Support Center. She then activated these vouchers, creating huge fake orders that made it seem like it was a corporate event. Once that was done, she deleted the false orders, which had an average value of just under $500, and added up to a whopping $4,085,043.
Ingram had been a Home Depot employee since 2008, and she committed the crime between March 2020 and July 2021. She pled guilty to her crime on May 1, 2025, and was sentenced to three years and one month in prison alongside three years of supervised release. The report also states that she stole the money to fund a rather extravagant gambling habit.
“While employed at The Home Depot, the defendant abused the trust placed in her and stole a staggering $4 million from the company,” said US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. Ingram was also ordered to pay nearly $3.95 million to Home Depot, which is not going to be easy.
Fraud is not the only thing that has haunted the retailer of late. Sales have also fallen as regular Americans struggle to make ends meet. Last year, a report stated that Home Depot’s underwhelming sales performance was bad news for the American economy. Back then, the retail corporation reported that its US stores that had been open for more than a year only recorded a 0.2% increase in sales in the last quarter. This suggests that homeowners might be putting off big remodeling projects for smaller renovations that don’t cost as much.
The retailer believes that the lack of sales is due to people’s lack of interest in undertaking big remodeling projects at this point in time. “We believe that consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing are disproportionately impacting home improvement demand,” Home Depot CEO Ted Decker said. The company also said that a lack of natural disasters like storms, for example, has left people without a need to visit Home Depot stores.
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