RIVERSIDE, California
A woman from Riverside County was given a 57-month prison sentence for stealing almost $1 million from her job, according to officials.
The company she worked for handled money matters for homeowner groups, mainly in the Inland Empire. Judge Sunshine S. Sykes, who ruled, also told Jenev Boyd, 60, from Corona, to pay back $780,810.
Boyd pleaded guilty in December 2023 to one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.
Boyd was a long-time employee of Encore Property Management and the director of accounting. This Corona-based company provided property management services to its homeowner association clients, offiicials stated.
From January 2012 to August 2020, Boyd reactivated retired or non-active client accounts in a software program Encore used to falsely reflect that these were still active clients.
She then changed the selected vendor’s information to reflect her own name and address.
By manipulating Encore’s internal accounting software, Boyd could mask payments to herself from client accounts as vendor payments. Boyd kept the monthly amounts in line with other vendor payments, hiding the embezzlement.
Boyd also forged signatures, including that of Encore’s president, on each check she fraudulently issued to herself. She also misled the company’s clients about the checks she wrote to herself out of their accounts, including by describing the transactions as being for operating expenses rather than as a payment to her based on a bogus invoice.
Boyd defrauded her employer and its clients out of $931,077.
“[Boyd] abused the trust of her friends and co-workers and convinced them they did not need to look more carefully at bank reports, which she doctored before providing an accounting to each client she had embezzled from,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “As a result of her fraud, employees left the business, and those who considered her a friend, like a sister, felt blindsided and betrayed.”
The FBI investigated this matter.
Assistant United States Attorney Sean D. Peterson of the Riverside Branch Office prosecuted this case.