A Minnesota woman has been sentenced to 51 months in federal prison for embezzling over $2.7 million from her employer, most of which she gambled away.
Destiny McKayla Combs, 37, was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court, said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson. Her sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office explained:
“Combs was the accounting manager for a surrogacy agency and an affiliated law firm for approximately nine years. In her position, Combs was solely responsible for managing both companies’ finances, including taxes and financial statements. Combs was such a trusted member of the management team that, in 2022, the company’s owner agreed to sell the surrogacy agency to Combs upon his retirement in 2023. As the sale date approached, however, Combs abruptly quit and moved to Florida.
A subsequent investigation revealed that between February 2019 and June 2023, Combs embezzled approximately $2.72 million from the businesses. Combs’s scheme was simple: she used personal credit cards to fund her gambling habit, then used company funds to pay her credit card bills. Combs stole the money to fuel her online gambling addiction. She made fraudulent entries in the companies’ books to disguise her credit card payments as business expenses and exploited the trust and autonomy her company gave her to go undetected. Over 52 months, Combs made approximately 292 payments from the company accounts to her personal American Express credit card, totaling $2,723,025.
While this case was pending and Combs was under the supervision of pretrial services, she repeatedly lied to her probation officer and violated her terms of release. Among other things, without authorization or knowledge of her probation officer, she traveled to New York City, New York; Tucson, Arizona; Miami, Florida; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Seattle, Washington.”
“Combs treated her workplace like her own personal slot machine,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Thompson. “Combs’s crime is part of a disturbing wave of fraud sweeping across Minnesota. From private companies to public programs, fraud has seeped into every corner of our state. We will continue to attack this fraud plague with everything we’ve got at the federal level.”
In handing down the sentence, Judge John M. Gerrard noted Combs’s bad behavior while on pretrial-release, which was in flagrant violation of the travel restrictions imposed upon her by the Court.
Combs will be required to serve at least 85% of her sentence before becoming eligible for parole.
The case was the result of an investigation conducted by the United States Secret Service and the Minnesota Commerce Fraud Bureau.
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Minnesota Crime Watch & Information publishes news, info and commentary about crime, public safety and livability issues in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
Crime Watch MN
Minnesota Crime Watch & Information publishes news, info and commentary about crime, public safety and livability issues in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.
