A UK-based System Integrator Chillblast product manager stole nearly £200,000 worth of PC hardware over several years and then flogged it on Gumtree and eBay.
Matthew Hudson (pictured) and his chum Daniel Key sold up to thirty laptops, ten desktop systems, 50 graphics cards, and shedloads of storage drives and monitors.
Prosecutor Tom Nicholson told Bournemouth Crown Court how Hudson exploited the trust of his colleagues due to his position and access to inventory checklists and customer returns. He has been doing it from 2013 until 2019. Daniel Key helped Hudson sell these stolen goods and split the profits from their sales.
Hudson was good at hiding his tracks on paper by manipulating stock levels, stealing items from custom returns, and making new items in the inventory unavailable by showing items as returned and credited.
He was discovered when an employee spotted a special notebook only the company could have had in stock, listed for sale on Gumtree. Benedict Miles, Chillblast’s managing director, got Key’s address from the Gumtree listing and compared the product’s serial number with his inventory list, and they matched.
The next day, Hudson was suspended but attempted a not-very-clean getaway by offering a resignation letter without prejudice and reimbursement for the stolen goods. Chillblast rejected the offer. A Chillblast employee probed his laptop before the hard drive could be returned to him for privacy reasons, finding more incriminating evidence as it contained his phone back up, thus exposing the criminal operation.
Hudson and Key were arrested in 2019 but weren’t charged by the police until 2023 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues between the Crown Prosecution Service and the Dorset Police. Hudson was finally sentenced to jail for three years and eight months on 7 December. Key was sentenced to two years in prison after being found responsible for selling about £109,000 of stolen goods.
The estimated worth of the stolen goods was roughly $250,960, of which Daniel sold $136,773 worth of inventories.
