Thief ordered to repay $300,000 to victims

Vancouver Sun, December 2, 2003

A former bookkeeper with a 100-year-old Vancouver company who was accused of “electronic embezzlement” has been ordered by a B.C. Supreme Court judge to repay about $300,000.
David Unrau was sued by his former employer, Donovan Sales , after he was terminated when financial irregularities were discovered. He is still facing a criminal charge of fraud over $5,000. His preliminary hearing is set for next year.
Unrau’s alleged fraud scheme was novel. Once a month, he allegedly ran his Visa card through the company’s credit card terminal and processed a “refund” on his card as if returning goods.
His former employer alleges Unrau used some of money to do substantial renovations to his Delta home, including an extensive addition where Unrau and his wife Tracy operate a day-care centre.
Unrau’s wife is part of a separate lawsuit, which also names as defendants the company’s accountant, Terrance Sigmund, and the Toronto Dominion Bank, which issued Unrau’s credit card and processed the allegedly fraudulent transactions.
In its lawsuit, Donovan Sales claims Sigmund and the TD Bank were negligent for failing to detect the embezzlement through credit card transactions and failing to detect that credit card refunds had inexplicably increased by more than 1,000 per cent over a one-year period.
The legal action claims that even though Unrau had a spending limit of $5,000 on his TD Visa card, some months he would “refund” more than $12,000, which was never questioned by the bank.
The bank failed to advise Donovan Sales of the suspicious activity, the lawsuit claims, and failed to follow reasonable fraud prevention practices established by the Visa Association, which requires that credit card refunds be matched to credit card purchases.
The case was part of The Vancouver Sun’s crime series earlier this year.