Her case is expected to go before the federal grand jury convening in Muskogee on Wednesday.

Those engaged in smaller embezzlements often are people who have a gambling habit or who fell on hard times, police say.

Muskogee Police Investigator Mark Ridley just sent an investigative report to prosecutors in which a McDonald’s employee claimed she was the victim of an armed robbery. She said she was robbed when she took the business’s bank deposit to First National Bank in Muskogee just before midnight recently.

The 25-year-old woman has since confessed the robbery was staged so she could spend part of the money, Ridley said Friday.

“She fell on hard times recently — got demoted, said she was fixing to lose her apartment, and she had children ... she wrote out a confession,” he said.

Now she has no job, he said.

Police Sgt. Bryan Farmer said the last embezzlement he investigated was linked to a gambling habit.

He remembers it was more than a year ago. A pizza place manager claimed he was the victim of an armed robbery.

“Guilt got to him, I guess — he gave a confession and told everything he did,” Farmer said.

Within the past two months, embezzlements from two Muskogee attorneys were reported, both for more than $100,000. Prosecutors are studying investigative reports on those cases. Motives for the embezzlements are not known.

“Bad habits (gambling) and hard times —Oh yeah,” are the two reasons Muskogee Police Investigator Lonnie Bemo gives for the embezzlements he’s investigated.

One clerk at a Kum & Go kept going back to the store and getting more money and returning to the casino where he hoped he’d win the money back, Bemo recalled.

Being short of money and bills being piled up are also given as reasons for embezzlements, said Muskogee Police Investigator Greg Martin.

And although prisons are overcrowded, there needs to be punishment for embezzlement, Moore and Sperling said.

“I think in any type of embezzlement case where the victim, public or private, is out money, if restitution is all that people are afraid of, that’s not a very big deterrent,” Moore said.