A Best Buy employee in Florida was charged with fraud after allegedly using his manager’s code to heavily discount nearly 150 items that he and his accomplices purchased and pawned.
It seems that the manager first started growing suspicious about “strange sales numbers” in December 2024, an ABC News affiliate in West Palm Beach reported. Private investigators traced the weird sales back to a 36-year-old employee, Matthew Lettera, who allegedly conducted 97 discounted purchases for himself and 52 additional transactions for others. Some MacBooks were discounted as much as 99 percent, a local CW affiliate reported. In total, Best Buy lost more than $118,000 from the scheme.
According to a LinkedIn profile that matches Lettera’s information, he started working at Best Buy in January 2020 after pivoting from career training as a chef.
An arrest affidavit from the Palm Beach Police Department reviewed by a local CBS News affiliate alleged that Lettera’s scheme did not start until March 2024, about four years into his Best Buy career as an “experience manager.” A switch seemingly flipped, as Lettera allegedly conducted dozens of heavily discounted transactions that went unnoticed for months, seemingly growing bolder and eventually recruiting coworkers to join the scheme.
He apparently didn’t expect the Best Buy managers to detect the losses or seek to retrieve pawned merchandise, but that was a miscalculation. Lettera was arrested after police tracked down some of the discounted MacBook laptops at local pawn shops. Cooperating with police, the pawn shops provided sales records allegedly showing that Lettera sold the steeply discounted products and profited from exploiting Best Buy’s discount system.