A former escort has been sentenced to more than four years in prison for defrauding a company out of $5.8 million after a man who hired her let her use his company credit card.
Crystal Lundberg’s brazen spending spree began four years ago, after a high-ranking formerly married financial executive, Scott Kennedy, let Lundberg and her daughters move in with him.
Her 53-month sentence was handed down Monday in U.S. District Court.
Kennedy would later admit he’d fallen in love with Lundberg, an escort he’d met online. And Lundberg, 33, took advantage of him. After Kennedy’s personal credit card balances ballooned to $41,000, Lundberg asked if she could use his corporate credit card to give her daughters a big Christmas. He gave in.
“I physically handed it to her and told her we have to pay this back,” Kennedy testified earlier this year. He said, “I was trying to be a provider for my family.”
But together, Kennedy and Lundberg would rack up $5.79 million in charges on an account belonging to Nemera, a drug device company with a plant in Buffalo Grove. Nemera caught the pair in 2017, and the feds filed charges later that year.
Kennedy quickly began to cooperate, pleaded guilty to wire fraud early in 2018 and is awaiting sentencing. He also became the star witness at Lundberg’s trial, which ended with her conviction of five counts of wire fraud. Her defense attorney, Glenn Jazwiec, noted in a recent court memo that she was also acquitted on one count.
“Ms. Lundberg has been shamed in the eyes of her family and her children,” Jazwiec wrote. “Ms. Lundberg is frightened about what will happen to her children if she goes to prison for a lengthy period of time. The thought of major life events taking place without the presence of their mother is more than unsettling to her.”
A forensic analyst working for Nemera found the couple wracked up $970,000 in travel and transportation costs across thousands of transactions, as well as $606,000 for clothing and accessories and $585,000 for a planned medical spa, records show.
Prosecutors say Lundberg told multiple lies along the way. Kennedy testified at trial that Lundberg told him she had a $4 million trust fund that would vest when she turned 30, and the couple planned to pay Nemera back with that money. Though Lundberg claimed her adoptive father had set up the trust fund, a prosecutor said that person, in reality, “was a former paramour of Lundberg’s who had never made her the beneficiary of his wealth.”
Lundberg eventually moved to San Diego and allegedly told a neighbor she had an adoptive father who was a former executive at Bank of America. She allegedly identified Kennedy as her father’s trustee, saying Kennedy managed her money at her father’s direction.
When the FBI searched Lundberg’s home in May 2017, prosecutors said they discovered Lundberg had altered Kennedy’s W-2s and pay stubs to make it look like she was the owner of a profitable business. She then attached the documents to a lease application claiming she earned $200,000 a year.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Malizia called Lundberg’s fraud “knowing, blatant, and wholly inexcusable.”
