A 47-year-old woman has been charged with stealing more than $1 million while working at a Minneapolis property management company, according to a federal indictment.
Mai Houa Xiong, who now lives in Fresno, Calif., was indicted by a grand jury in Minneapolis on charges of wire fraud, identity theft and filing false tax returns. She allegedly ran the scheme for more than six years until August 2021, even after she was fired.
Xiong was arrested last week and awaits her next court hearing, which has yet to be scheduled. Court records do not list an attorney for her.
Public court records do not disclose the name of the company that employed Xiong until she was fired in July 2021.
According to court documents:
Xiong was hired as a financial manager for the company in May 2013 and "had little oversight and nearly unfettered access" to the bank accounts and other financial systems of numerous Twin Cities homeowner associations (HOA) that were the company's clients.
The money she stole came from fees the HOAs collected from residents to cover maintenance, construction and other costs.
Xiong repeatedly accessed the HOAs' bank accounts and transferred money into her personal bank accounts. She disguised these transfers by mislabeling them as legitimate HOA expenses. She also made cash withdrawals directly from the HOAs' accounts, even for a month after she was fired.
As one consequence of her embezzlement, an HOA that Xiong stole from had to scrap a $1.3 million roof replacement project because the money it believed it had was not there.
Despite finding a new job after being fired, Xiong illegally collected unemployment insurance from the state from October 2021 until last January.
