Home Depot employee accused of swapping $400K in store cash for counterfeit bills

The U.S. Secret Service busted a four-year scheme Monday in which a Home Depot employee in Arizona passed nearly $400,000 in counterfeit cash.

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Adrian Jean Pineda, a vault associate, is accused of taking cash from the Tempe store’s deposits between 2018 and 2022, and replacing it with counterfeit bills during his shifts, KSAZ-TV reported.

Court documents state that part of Pineda’s responsibilities included preparing the cash from the store’s registers, counting money and sealing cash bags for deposit at Wells Fargo, KTVK reported.

During the arrest, agents recovered about $5,000 in counterfeit cash and $5,300 in real money, as well as another $22,000 of real money while searching Pineda’s house, the TV station reporting, noting that Secret Service officials confirmed that Home Depot lost an estimated $387,500 as a result of the scheme.

According to court documents, Home Depot officials contacted the Secret Service in late December 2021, claiming that Pineda passed counterfeit money. According to investigators, Pineda was caught on surveillance video slipping counterfeit bills into bank deposits at least 16 times, KSAZ-TV reported.

“(Pineda) was taking out the real money and replacing it with counterfeit, so if you had a thousand dollars of counterfeit that he brought in to work that day, he would take ten 100 dollar bills out of the stack for the bank deposit,” Frank Boudreaux Jr., special agent in charge with the U.S. Secret Service’s Phoenix Field Office, told the TV station.

“There was a lot of coordination, and it was strategic in proving that this was knowingly and willingly committed,” Boudreaux added.

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