Consultant gets fired unceremoniously after using daily $50 lunch credit to fund his side business for months: 'He was embezzling $40 to $45 a day for "lunch" while eating PB&J sandwiches'

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Nov 23, 2025 8:00 AM EST

Sure, some businesses waste a ton of money that could slip through the cracks, but this consultant's scheme was bound to fail.

At this firm, most consultants travel from Monday through Thursday and are given $50 to spend on lunch daily. Most folks on the team tend to eat together, so it did not take long for them to notice something strange about one of their coworkers. According to his monthly expense report, he was spending between $40 and $45 on lunch every day. 

This, of course, would have been more than acceptable, were it not for the fact that everyone on his team noticed that he was eating homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day.

So where was all that money going, you ask? Well, it turns out that the consultant was embezzling money from the firm to fund his side hustle and future business. It turns out that due to poor management, he was getting away with this behavior for months. However, as they say, all good things must come to an end.

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  • A person holds a blue credit card against a card reader.
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  • "Fired for lunch fraud"

    I worked at a top-tier consulting firm with a generous expense policy. Best summed up as "We work hard, we pay hard" (pun intended)
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  • Typical week was travel Mon- Thurs. Business class flights, a room at the Ritz Carlton, and non-stop work from sunrise to midnight with the omnipresent
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  • threat of an "up or out" culture hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles. At the end of the year you'd either get a fat bonus (mine was $43k my last full year) or you'd get fired.
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  • We had some really smart people working for us, but as anyone who's been around the sun a few times can tell you, smart people can do really dumb things.
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  • Any meal expense below $50 was automatically approved. Some clever individual bought one of those Square card readers, set up his own business, and started
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  • swiping his corporate card to pay himself. He was embezzling $40 to $45 a day for "lunch" while eating PB&J sandwiches.
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  • A typical project had us in one city for 6-8 weeks. Where this guy screwed up was he kept running his scam in multiple cities. This was pre-c
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  • machine learning was still somewhat new, but it was capable enough to detect patterns indicating fraudulent activity. Weeks of daily sub-$50 transactions at a random merchant in City A that nobody
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  • else ever visited (teams often ate lunch together) would raise a single red flag. Continuing the pattern when you're in City B and City C raised more red flags than 1930s Germany.
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  • The guy threw away his career for a few thousand bucks, which they almost certainly clawed back from his final paycheck.
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  • A young businessman sits on the stairs in front of a corporate building with a cardboard box of personal items.
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    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • Afraid-Put8165 By brother in law had the best deal. He worked for a lab pack company. He quits to go back to school and get his masters. Unbeknownst to him, his boss had been told that if anyone else quit his team they were going to fire him. So he continued to get paid for almost a year. He called the guy after the first check and he didn't call him back. The checks finally stopped. He kept waiting for the company to ask for the money back. They never did. He ran into the guy years later at a c
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  • OP MSK165 Amazing. Reminds me of that "I am the machine" stand up routine where a guy got a minor in Russian without ever learning the language, all because the professor needed a minimum number of students and promised him a B if he didn't drop the class.
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  • realhumannotai Damn bro. I know a few people in a..shall not be named mega corporation. They have a new thing where they match your donations to charity organizations, with a limit. And these morons banded together with an insider from a specific charity organization and faked donations so the mega corp matched it. Charity insider kept a %, and the morons kept the rest. These guys had $200,000+ jobs!!! Emphasis on HAD. The most they gained from this was around $4,000 each.
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  • OP MSK165 I once bought markers and poster board at Wal Mart (needed for the project) and when I got to the register I grabbed a Coke. That expense got rejected because of the Coke. I had to go back and split the expense (took less than 30 seconds) and resubmit the Coke as travel meal and the other stuff as project materials.
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  • Martin Thunder42 Meta fired a bunch of employees not long ago for abusing their meal per diems. If I remember correctly, one woman figured she already had food at home, and used the per diem to buy small items at a pharmacy, like deodorant and shampoo. People need to take work policies for reimbursements and per diems more seriously. Trying to save $10 here, $20 there isn't worth losing a six-figure job.
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  • OP MSK165 Neither, but a different coworker with a gambling problem got busted and sent to prison for insider trading. That guy bought short term out of the money options for a company that was on the verge of being acquired ... on an acquisition that he managed! Dude turned $5k into almost $500k in less than a week, and in the process turned his corner office into a prison cell. (We had policies against buying or selling individually named stocks for this exact reason - so even without the crim
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  • OP MSK165 Because the hours between 6p and sunrise you're working from your hotel room.
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  • SeinfeldFrasier Why stay at the Ritz if you're working sunrise to midnight?
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