Worker’s MySpace page tips former employer off about comp fraud
August 30, 2009 by Fred HosierPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Workers' comp
It’s true: Managers can find comp fraud by viewing employees’ social networking Web pages.
Dollar Tree in Virginia suspected an employee was abusing workers’ comp. She’d received more than $100,000 over a year and a half for back problems.
The employee posted on her MySpace page that she had a side job taking photos at a wedding.
Dollar Tree representatives saw her lugging camera equipment and picking up children at the event, showing no signs of back pain.
The retailer won its appeal of her case.
Has an employee’s Web page ever tipped your company off about workers’ comp or another type of fraud? Let us know in the Comments Box below.
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Tags: Dollar Tree, fraud, Workers' comp
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August 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Some of our employees were engaged in a weekend backyard mixed martial arts fight club. They have a web site with T-shirts for sale and 3 video clips of people fighting, also posted on u tube. In one of the video’s it clearly shows our employee break his wrist.
The Sunday of the weekend in question our swing shift Supervisor see’s the employee in a local store with a cast on his wrist. The following Monday the employee shows up for work with out the cast. Luckily the day shift Supervisor spotted the employee before he went to work and claimed a comp injury.
It’s just not enough to have all your policies, procedures and training in place you also have to be vigilant.
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Hopefully, the Dollar Tree employee was fired and had to pay back every dollar they stole along with reembursing thier employer for costs incurred through their fraud.
September 9th, 2009 at 11:14 am
We had an employee who was stealing clothing from our company and then wearing them in pictures on her my space page. It was so dumb that the local paper picked up on it and published the details including the charges brought and the employees name. What made it even better is that she was also using the job to fill a school requirement .
May 11th, 2010 at 12:16 pm
A good friend of mine was a supervisor for a local branch of a large chain pharmacy store. He had a couple of employees call in sick on a Friday, same day that there was a major concert in a nearby town. These employees were very careful not to mention anything about the upcoming concert at the workplace but talked all about it on their myspace page before and how great it was afterwards. My friend printed out the pertinent parts from their myspace pages and turned it over to his HR dept.
Both employees received reprimands, weren’t paid for those so-called sick days and neither one ever figured out how HR found out about it. They would have been fired but the unemployment rate was at an all time low then and many places were having a hard time finding warm bodies that could pass drug screenings to fill positions!
If you’re gonna friend your supervisor on your myspace page use your brains about what you post on it!