Home Depot worker is arrested for swapping $387,500 of real cash for fake prop bills used in movies which he bought on Amazon

 An Arizona Home Depot 'vault associate' has been arrested for allegedly swapping out nearly $400,000 of the store's real money for the last four years with counterfeit cash he bought off Amazon.  

Adrian Jean Pineda secretly siphoned $387,500 handed to him from the store's registers in Tempe and replaced it with the phony currency commonly used in movies and clearly marked as fake, Secret Service agents said after his arrest last Monday.

Pineda was able to pull off the brazen heist thanks to his job as a 'vault associate' at the home appliance store, a position that called for the staffer to collect the store's daily earnings and deposit them at a nearby Wells Fargo bank, according to the feds.

Bank staffers would then collect the bundles of real and counterfeit notes - which have 'PLAYMONEY' written as a serial number and disclaimers that read 'movie prop use only' - and deposit it into an account holding several stores' earnings.  

According to Bourdreaux, Pineda brought to work about $800 to $1,200 of the fake dollar bills at a time, taking money from the deposits and replacing it with counterfeit cash during his shifts. Pictured here are hundred dollar bills seized from Pineda during his arrest Monday

At a glance, the bills appear real - accurately scaled to size and featuring text found on real currency. The bills cost $8.96 for a pack of 10 from the online retailer. Pictured here are fifty dollar bills seized from Pineda during his arrest Monday

Home Depot became aware of the larceny, feds say, after execs detected a large number of fake bills coming from one particular store, and enlisted the US Secret Service to find the culprit. 

'He was just in a really good position to do the crime,' Frank Boudreaux Jr., the agent in charge of the Phoenix Secret Service's office that investigated the incident said Sunday of Pineda's alleged thievery.

Pineda faces federal counterfeiting charges that can land him in prison for 20 years.

He is set to appear in federal court on Monday for a status hearing. 

According to Bourdreaux's office, the crime took place over the span of four years.

The store started reporting losses in January 2018 due to the counterfeit notes coming up in their cash deposits, agents said, which continued through last month.

However, in December, after the losses ballooned to near into the hundreds of thousands, puzzled and peeved Home Depot execs grew tired of the inexplicable filching, and contacted the U.S. Secret Service to investigate. 

Agents arrested Tempe Home Depot employee Adrian Jean Pineda last Monday for secretly siphoning $387,500 of funds from the store's registers over the course of several years, replacing it with the phony currency commonly used in Hollywood movies

Eventually, after less than two months of investigating, agents from Bourdreaux's office arrested Pineda inside the Home Depot store on January 31. 

During the arrest, agents seized $5,000 in the counterfeit cash and recovered $5,300 in real money, according to the news release Friday, with agents recovering an additional $22,000 in genuine currency while conducting a search warrant on Pineda's home. 

Pineda bought the prop bills from Amazon, Bourdreaux's office said after the arrest, which are commonly used for television and movie productions.

At a glance, the bills appear real - accurately scaled to size and featuring text found on real currency but with the disclaimer 'MOVIDE PROP USE ONLY.' The bogus bills cost $8.96 for a pack of 10 from the online retailer.

According to Bourdreaux, Pineda brought to work about $800 to $1,200 of the fake hundred dollar bills at a time, taking money from the deposits and replacing it with counterfeit cash during his shifts.

After cashiers brought Pineda the day’s receipts from the registers, he would swap real bills with fake ones, feds say, hiding fistfuls of real money on, the complaint said.

During the arrest, agents seized $5,000 in the counterfeit cash and recovered $5,300 in real money, according to the news release Friday, with a gents recovering an additional $22,000 in genuine currency while conducting a search warrant on Pineda's home

Surveillance cameras caught him doing this at least 16 times, agents added.

According to Boudreaux, the bills are 'highly realistic,' with a perfectly printed Benjamin Franklin and an adjacent vertical blue line almost identical to the 3-D security ribbon found on actual bills, and easily attainable, creating a problem for law enforcement.

'I wish they didn’t sell it.' 

Despite looking legitimate, however, the counterfeit bills possess a much different feel than real bills, which are made of cotton and linen and have a thicker feel, instead of the fake bills' more papery texture, Boudreaux said.  

The agent added that investigators grew suspicious of Pineda during their probe, when they saw him leading a lavish lifestyle that exceeded the typical budget for someone in his position, splurging on a personal trainer and a new car.

'It was evident that he was spending much more than he was making,' said Boudreaux after the arrest. The agent added that he did not know how much Pineda was earning.

What's more, when Boudreaux and his team began the investigation in December, they subpoenaed Pineda’s Amazon records and found he had purchased an exorbitant amount of the fake bills, which tellingly amounted to roughly the same as the total loss attributed to the phony money coming from the Home Depot store.

'So that kind of tied it all together,' Mr. Boudreaux said.

'This case illustrates the continued commitment of the Secret Service and the US Attorney’s Office to investigating and prosecuting counterfeit violations,' Boudreaux said in the statement, adding that Pineda's arrest 'marked the culmination of a strategic investigation enacted by Phoenix special agents, Home Depot security personnel and Wells Fargo Bank.'