Hardeeville woman accused of stealing $45,000 from her employer, court records show
A Hardeeville woman is charged with stealing $45,000 from the cash advance company she worked for in Bluffton and covering it up, according to Beaufort County court records.
Laquandra Campbell, 36, faced two counts of breach of trust with fraudulent intent Thursday, according to Beaufort County Detention Center logs. The charges are felonies and can bring up to ten years in prison on each count upon conviction.
Campbell was the manager of Advance America on Fording Island Road, which offers cash loans. She was the only person on site with access to the cash vault, according to a report from the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.
In mid-September 2019, the branch received a cash delivery of $35,000 from an armored truck, but the money was never entered in as having been officially delivered, according to an arrest affidavit filed in the court.
That’s when Advance America’s corporate office became alarmed and contacted law enforcement, according to the Sheriff’s Office report.
A corporate employee went to audit the store nearly a week later and found the cash in the vault matched what the system said it had, according to the report.
But the corporate employee “had a gut feeling that something was not right,” and the report says she discovered Campbell had wire transferred the $35,000 to another store so that the employee “would not be alerted to the missing monies.”
That money is still missing, the report says.
Another affidavit filed in court Thursday says that a day later, Campbell accepted $10,000 in a cash delivery and again did not log it into the company’s records.
Campbell was booked into the detention center on Thursday and released the same day on a $20,000 personal recognizance bond.
