ATLANTA – Sonya Hesenius, a former office manager and executive assistant for a company in Alpharetta, Georgia, has been sentenced to federal prison for embezzling more than $8.5 million between 2015 and 2020.

“Hesenius will now be held accountable for her flagrant theft of millions of dollars from her employer to support a lavish lifestyle,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan. “Hesenius was entrusted with handling the financial responsibilities for the company where she worked.  But she chose to steal from the company, blatantly using company funds to pay for expensive, overseas vacations for herself and family members, plastic surgery, shopping binges at exclusive retail stores, and other exorbitant purchases.”

“Hesenius worked in a position of trust for a company that expected her to honor that trust,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. “Instead, she chose to abuse it and her personal greed not only hurt the company, but everyone who worked for them. This sentence should send the message that the FBI takes wire fraud extremely seriously and will work to hold offenders accountable.”

According to U.S. Attorney Buchanan, the charges and other information presented in court: Between 2015 and 2020, Sonya Hesenius was employed as an office manager and executive assistant at a company in Alpharetta, Georgia that provides third-party yard management services. During her employment, Hesenius made fraudulent charges on corporate credit cards and caused the company to reimburse her personal credit card for personal expenses. To conceal her scheme, she coded and approved all the charges herself, withheld supporting documentation from the company, and disguised the unauthorized expenditures in the company’s accounting system as legitimate expenses such as newspaper advertisements. Hesenius further spread the expenditures among different job sites to further conceal the fraud.

Hesenius used the fraudulently obtained funds to…