WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — A Warner Robins woman was sentenced to just over five years in prison after a jury convicted her of embezzling thousands from a Warner Robins chiropractic office and using the funds to buy over $10,000 in Apple products, federal prosecutors announced.
Emiliya Radford, 33, first started working for a Warner Robins clinic, Smith Spinal Care Center, on a one-year marketing contract back in September 2019. After the scheme, they have since went out of business.
“Financial crime can be life-changing for its victims; here, it forced a business’s closure and burdened innocent people with debt and other troubles," U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia Peter Leary said.
They say the spinal care center hired her business, Cyber Pinecone, but then in May 2020, Radford moved into a new position with the clinic: office manager. They say her new salary with the spinal care center was supposed to include her marketing work, but the U.S. Attorney's Office says she continued to cut checks to her business without approval from her clinic.
As part of her role as office manager, they say Radford was in charge of signing payroll checks and could write checks on behalf of the business.
With that power, they say she wrote $200,000 in checks to her business and she also gave herself an unapproved pay raise. Some funds, they say, also came from a federal COVID loan, which is where her stealing from a federal program charges came from.
With the funds from the business, prosecutors say she purchased more than $10,000 worth of products from the Apple store that were sent to her home. They were eventually able to find some of the products purchased when federal agents searched Radford's home, the press release said.
The case was investigated by the FBI.
On top of her five-year prison sentence, she was required to pay $298,942 in restitution to the owner of the chiropractic office, Dr. James C. Smith.