A former executive at a prestigious commercial real estate agency in Orange County has pled guilty to embezzling over $2.7 million from his employer by deceitfully submitting false invoices on behalf of companies owned by his family and friends. These invoices claimed payment for services that were never actually provided.
The guilty party, Varun Aggarwal, a 41-year-old resident of Irvine, entered a plea of guilt for one count of wire fraud, as confirmed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney has scheduled a sentencing hearing for January 22, where Aggarwal could face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.
According to his plea agreement, Aggarwal worked in the internal auditing department of KBS Realty Advisors, a reputable company based in Newport Beach, from 2008 until January 2022, eventually reaching the position of director. Aggarwal confessed to exploiting his role at KBS to embezzle funds from the company, a crime he committed between January 2012 and January 2022.
Given his membership in the company’s internal auditing group, Aggarwal was intimately acquainted with KBS’s protocols and procedures for vendor payments. He capitalized on this knowledge by enlisting his friends and family as approved vendors for contracting work at KBS.
Once these companies were approved as vendors, Aggarwal manipulated the process by submitting fraudulent invoices for consulting services that were never actually performed for the company. Through these approved vendors, Aggarwal then redirected the payments from KBS to his personal bank accounts, often without the vendors’ knowledge that the invoices and subsequent payments were benefiting Aggarwal personally. This information was disclosed in Aggarwal’s plea agreement, which was filed in a federal court in Santa Ana.
Aggarwal managed to illicitly obtain approximately $2.72 million from KBS as a result of this scheme.
After the company initiated an investigation into the suspect invoices, Aggarwal resigned from his position at KBS in January 2022, according to court documents.
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