Among Amazon warehouse managers, Kayricka Wortham was one of the highest paid individuals. Wortham, 31, supervises employees, manages productivity, and ensures the day’s operations run smoothly as an operations manager at a facility in Smyrna, Georgia. Everything in the warehouse could pass through her hands, including looking after how orders are sorted and packed into the familiar smirking box and coordinating with delivery service partners, or DSPs.
Upon holding Wortham’s position, which carries a salary of up to $100,000, there is considerable power attached to the position. Wortham, along with two other defendants, pleaded guilty in November to these charges, claiming that she abused her power and conspired with them to steal over $10 million from Amazon. While serving as Amazon’s Operations Manager, defendant Wortham is accused of stealing more than $9 million. With the assistance of her co-conspirators, Defendant Wortham created fake vendors and submitted fictitious invoices for those vendors, resulting in Amazon transferring approximately $9.4 million into the bank accounts of her and her co-conspirators.
On Amazon, you can either become a seller or a vendor. Using Amazon’s enormous product search engine, sellers use it to reach a wider audience, and anyone can do it. You must provide a credit card, legal documentation, and business registration for your application. First-party businesses are referred to as vendors. For Amazon to approve the company, the company enters into a partnership with it, in which Amazon purchases the company’s product in large quantities, pays them, and then resells the product to consumers on its website. In order to participate in this system, you must be approved by Amazon because if the product does not sell, you will not be reimbursed for the money Amazon paid you. According to prosecutors, Wortham and her co-conspirators exploited this system, in which Amazon serves as the only point of contact for vendors, and which they ship products and process invoices on their behalf.
A scheme involving defendant Wortham involved her providing false vendor information to unaware subordinates and requesting that they input the information into Amazon’s vendor system on her behalf. After the information was entered, defendant Wortham approved the fake vendor accounts, which were able to submit invoices for payment for the goods and services purported to have been provided by them.
Her partner Brittany Hudson, 37, who owned the DSP contracted with the warehouse, and Demetrius Hines, 35, who served as the warehouse’s loss prevention lead, were reportedly also co-conspirators, according to prosecutors. The document states that Hines was responsible for preventing loss and protecting Amazon employees, products, and information.
According to the prosecutors, Wortham applied to become a vendor around January 2022. As a result of her position, Wortham approved her own applications as well as those of her co-conspirators within her organization, as well as invoices paid to her vendor account within her organization. The invoices were falsely stating that these vendors provided goods and services to Amazon in fact, but in reality, they had not. The charging document also states that Wortham recruited other individuals to act as purported vendor contacts for the fake vendors entered into Amazon’s system in order to facilitate the conspiracy. She would pay them for their assistance by directing some of the payments to their accounts, according to the document.
It is stated in the document that Wortham continued to submit invoices for the fake vendors she and others had created until she left Amazon two months after she and the others allegedly began the conspiracy. Wortham and Hines pleaded guilty in late November. In her plea agreement, Wortham agreed that she would forfeit $9,469,731.45 to the U.S. government, the amount prosecutors claim she stole from Amazon in 2011, when Amazon had made $514 billion in the same year.
Upon her sentence on May 2, Worthham faces a 20-year maximum prison sentence. Hines is scheduled to be sentenced in April. Hudson has pleaded not guilty to a wire fraud charge and awaits trial. Wortham was released on bail after being indicted; however, she was ordered to be revoked her bail on January 26 due to her violation of the bail terms. She and Hudson were arrested shortly after.
Alexis Boutilier is from Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a high interest in all things tech and loves to stay engaged on all the latest appliances and accessories.