A Kansas man, Barry Cummings, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for defrauding an energy management company's incentive rewards program, resulting in a $1.2 million financial loss to the company. In addition to his prison sentence, Cummings will serve two years of supervised release and is ordered to pay more than $1.2 million in restitution, according to court documents.
Cummings, aged 52 and a resident of Overland Park, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud. Court records indicate that in 2017, he was hired by a business in Lenexa, Kansas, and entered the company's rewards program. The energy management company offered a performance-based rewards program to incentivize non-employee resellers, contractors, and others to sell its products. Participants in this program submitted sales information to earn redeemable points for rewards such as airline vouchers, hotel stays, gift cards, and electronic devices.
Cummings admitted in his plea agreement to orchestrating a scheme over several years to defraud the company's rewards program. He confessed to logging into the rewards site and submitting fraudulent sales claims, falsely indicating he had sold the company’s products. Despite the thousands of false claims he made, Cummings admitted he never sold a single product from the company.
Even after being terminated from the Lenexa business in April 2018, Cummings continued to use his old business email to log into the rewards website and submit fraudulent invoices. As an example of his fraudulent activities, in a single 12-hour period in November 2018, Cummings submitted 834 fraudulent invoices, receiving over 2.8 million points. In 2019 alone, he submitted 5,543 false claims for 22.5 million points, leading to the acquisition of over 2,000 rewards and causing a $1,233,024 loss to the company.
This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with valuable cooperation from the victim energy company. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Huschka prosecuted the case.
