An ex-employee at an "attainable luxury" clothing store at Burnaby's Metrotown mall has been handed a 18-month conditional sentence with house arrest and 100 hours of community work service for making more than $81,000 in bogus refunds at the store.
Xining Yiyuan Chong, a 32-year-old Surrey resident, pleaded guilty in Vancouver provincial court Monday to one count of fraud over $5,000.
The charge relates to 185 fake refunds he made onto his debit card at the Metropolis at Metrotown Oak + Fort between March 1 and April 21, 2022, when he was an employee there.
The refunds totalled $81,616.36.
Insurance covered $10,000 (after a $1,000 deductible), but the rest remains outstanding, according to Crown prosecutor Louise Gauld.
B.C. provincial court Judge Nancy Adams described the fraud as "a very serious matter."
"He was in a position of trust there as an employee," she said. "He owed that to his employer, and the only reason that he is known to have taken those funds was purely from greed."
Gauld and defence lawyer Zach Myers both called for an 18-month conditional sentence with house arrest and 100 hours of community work service.
They also agreed Chong should be ordered to get substance abuse counselling, pay Oak + Fort back $72,616.36 and write a letter of apology to the store.
Adams agreed to the joint submission.
"In my view, that is an appropriate sentence," she said.
While the offence was a serious breach of trust involving a large loss to the company, Adams noted Chong had no criminal record and had saved the court significant time and expense by pleading guilty to the fake refunds, which were caught on CCTV and logged in the store's records.
"Proving these individual transactions would have been complicated and taken some time," Adams said.
She said she also accepted that Chong was "extremely remorseful" for his crimes.
During his 18-month sentence, Chong is banned from going to any Oak + Fort store in B.C.
Adams warned him that a conditional sentence is a jail sentence served in the community and that, if he violated the terms of his CSO, he could be made to serve the rest of his sentence in "real jail."
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