Amazon delivery business owner stole $10M to buy luxury cars and fund lavish lifestyle
An Amazon delivery business owner stole nearly $10 million to buy luxury cars and fund a lavish lifestyle with her “partner in crime,” federal prosecutors have said.
Brittany Hudson, a 40-year-old from Atlanta, was found guilty by a federal jury last week in a fraud scheme where she and an Amazon warehouse manager from Atlanta, Kayricka Wortham, 34, stole millions of dollars.
“Hudson and her literal partner in crime brazenly stole nearly $10 million from Amazon through a fraud scheme involving fake vendors and invoices,” Theodore S. Hertzberg, a U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “A federal jury put an end to Hudson’s insatiable greed by returning a guilty verdict on 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, and forgery.”
Hudson owned Legend Express LLC, a business contracted with Amazon to deliver packages. Wortham, who was romantically involved with Hudson, worked as an operations manager at an Amazon warehouse in Smyrna, Georgia, where she approved new Amazon vendors and vendor invoice payments.
In their scheme that lasted from about January to June 2022, Wortham gave fake vendor information to clueless subordinates for them to put into Amazon’s vendor system, according to federal prosecutors.
Wortham and another unnamed co-conspirator, who worked for Amazon, then approved the fake vendors, allowing the vendors to submit invoices, the prosecutors said.
Hudson and Wortham then submitted invoices, falsely stating the fake vendors provided goods and services to Amazon, prosecutors said.
Wortham approved these invoices and Amazon transferred a total of about $9.4 million to bank accounts controlled by the two defendants and other co-conspirators during the scheme, according to prosecutors.
With the stolen money, Hudson and Wortham bought a nearly $1 million home in Smyrna and a fleet of top-of-the-line cars, including a 2019 Lamborghini Urus, a 2021 Dodge Durango, a 2022 Tesla Model X, a 2018 Porsche Panamera, and a Kawasaki ZX636 motorcycle, prosecutors said.
But Hudson and Wortham’s lavish lifestyle came to a crashing halt when they were federally charged with defrauding Amazon in September 2022.
While on bond in January 2023, the two falsely claimed to a potential business partner that their charges had been dropped, according to prosecutors.
They emailed fake court documents with forged signatures from Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr., who has since retired, and one of the then-prosecutors on the case, Cobb County Magistrate Judge Norman L. Barnett, to back up the lie, prosecutors said.
Hudson also emailed fake bank and personal financial statements that inflated the balances of her and Wortham’s accounts.
For her part in the scheme, Wortham was convicted of fraud in November 2022 after pleading guilty. She was later sentenced to 16 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay about $9.4 million in restitution to Amazon.
She also pleaded guilty to forgery of the signature of a federal judge last October and will be sentenced for the charge on March 25. Hudson’s sentencing will take place on June 16.
The Independent has reached out to Amazon for comment.
