TECH: A woman convicted by American justice for having stolen 3,000 iPods intended for students.

It is one thing to steal from the gov­ern­ment, but steal­ing from chil­dren is much worse. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this is pre­cise­ly what an employ­ee of the New Mex­i­co school dis­trict did. Kristy Stock was sen­tenced to 18 months in fed­er­al prison for her role in a scheme to steal and resell more than 3,000 iPods intend­ed for Native Amer­i­can students.

A state­ment released by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice details the charges against Stock for tax eva­sion and trans­port of stolen goods. Accord­ing to her plea agree­ment and court doc­u­ments, the pro­gram began in 2013 when she was in charge of a pro­gram for the New Mex­i­co Con­sol­i­dat­ed Cen­tral School Dis­trict designed to pro­vide devices to Native Amer­i­can stu­dents liv­ing on trib­al reservations.

While over­see­ing the pro­gram, Stock was sup­posed to use fed­er­al grant mon­ey to pur­chase iPods to dis­trib­ute to stu­dents. How­ev­er, with the help of oth­er con­spir­a­tors, includ­ing his friend James Ben­der and Saurabh Chawla, the group end­ed up ship­ping the stolen iPods to Mary­land where they were list­ed on eBay before being sold at a “sub­stan­tial markup.” “.

Due to the sus­pen­sion of her own account for secu­ri­ty rea­sons, Chawla was forced to use Ben­der’s eBay account to list stolen devices at auc­tion, with Ben­der serv­ing as an inter­me­di­ary. Lat­er, between 2015 and 2018, Stock com­mu­ni­cat­ed direct­ly with Chawla, pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion on the make, mod­el, col­or and quan­ti­ty of devices before agree­ing on a price and putting them up for auction.

In total, Stock admit­ted to mak­ing over $ 800,000 sell­ing stolen iPods between 2013 and 2018. To make mat­ters worse, Stock also filed fraud­u­lent income tax returns, result­ing in a tax loss of around 270,000. $. That said, while Stock faces an 18-month jail sen­tence, she actu­al­ly came out lighter than her co-con­spir­a­tor Chawla, who was sen­tenced to 66 months after fail­ing to pay more than $ 700,000. ‘tax­es. Dur­ing this time, Ben­der was sen­tenced to just 366 days in prison.

So while Stock and his crew end­ed up get­ting caught, the real les­son here is that crime does­n’t pay off here, espe­cial­ly if you steal kids and then lie on your tax­es about your ill-got­ten income. .