It began slowly.<\/p>\n
Milton 55-year-old Theresa Dawn Greer had been employed as an accounts administrator at\u00a0Nelson-based surveying firm Staig & Smith for a year in October 2019 when the first theft took place.<\/p>\n
It was a purchase of a $109; one transaction on a company credit card amid a sea of expenses.<\/p>\n
Greer created a \u201cfalse narrative\u201d, coding it in accounting software as something innocuous, business-related.<\/p>\n
The following month, she ripped off her employer for another $94 across two more transactions.<\/p>\n
Greer began making purchases from TradeMe, Briscoes, The Warehouse, Amazon \u2014\u00a0mostly home-decor items, furniture and motorcycle parts.<\/p>\n
For more than five years she got away with it, the scale of the fraud exploding every year until she was eventually caught\u00a0in January 2025.<\/p>\n
Greer appeared in the Dunedin District Court this week after pleading guilty to seven charges of theft in a special relationship, which represented 327 fraudulent transactions over more than five years \u2014\u00a0a total of $60,236.<\/p>\n
Her role involved collecting receipts made on company credit cards and consolidating them on accounting software.<\/p>\n
Managing director Alex Martin said Greer\u2019s scam was only unravelled by chance.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was chasing me up \u2026\u00a0so I went into our bank account just to make sure that I got all the receipts for the credit card,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When he browsed the transactions for the company card, he noticed a $700 payment to online shopping site AliExpress.<\/p>\n
It had been coded as survey targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen the penny, it just dropped,\u00a0and I ran to the bank,\u201d Mr Martin told the Otago Daily Times.<\/p>\n
The discovery, made once the defendant had moved to Milton and was working remotely, sparked a full investigation as the company had to audit accounts line by line back to 2019.<\/p>\n
Police later provided details of the woman\u2019s TradeMe account, which revealed one of her final fraudulent purchases, listed for a survey tripod was actually for a garden shed.<\/p>\n
Greer was not the only one with access to the specific credit card, meaning other staff also fell under scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Mr Martin described the process as \u201ctraumatic\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people have worked faithfully and honestly for you for all these years and then this suddenly brings their character, for a moment, into question.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the firm, which had 18 staff, had a family environment, exacerbating the sense of betrayal.<\/p>\n
\u201cA huge, huge breach of trust,\u201d Mr Martin called it. \u201cIt was colossal.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the start of this year, Greer had repaid the $60,000 but the associated cost of the investigation into the misspending blew out to $40,000.<\/p>\n
In court this week, Judge Emma Parsons noted the defendant had no previous convictions and was assessed as being remorseful.<\/p>\n
Taking into account\u00a0Greer\u2019s financial means, the judge ordered she pay further reparation of $10,000\u00a0at $50 a week.<\/p>\n
The court heard that, despite the prosecution, the defendant had managed to secure another job at a Dunedin business in a similar accounting role.<\/p>\n
A director of that company told the ODT they were aware of the woman\u2019s fraud convictions.<\/p>\n
So, did they trust Greer?<\/p>\n
\u201cA hundred percent,\u201d the man said. \u201cShe\u2019s actually really helped us \u2026\u00a0realising some flaws that we had. But yeah, I\u2019d stand by her 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n
Measures were in place to ensure all transactions were approved by others, the director said.<\/p>\n
Judge Parsons sentenced Greer to four months\u2019 community detention, imposing curfew hours that would allow for\u00a0travel to and from her new workplace.<\/p>\n
Mr Martin said he had accepted his former staff member\u2019s written apology but the repercussions from her crimes would endure.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe money was really massive, but actually, the breach of trust is the thing that you take with you for the rest of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Swindling spree <\/p>\n
2019: 3 thefts ($203)<\/p>\n
2020: 24 ($2332)<\/p>\n
2021: 37 ($6507)<\/p>\n
2022: 72 ($12,938)<\/p>\n
2023: 91 ($14,132)<\/p>\n
2024: 94 ($22,974)<\/p>\n
2025: 6 ($1148)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
rob.kidd@odt.co.nz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It began slowly. Milton 55-year-old Theresa Dawn Greer had been employed as an accounts administrator at\u00a0Nelson-based surveying firm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-550212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}