Debra Gottrell, former employee of Directory Plus, in Las Cruces, NM, has been indicted for fraud for allegedly stealing company property. It wasn’t computers or fax machines, though — Gottrell hoarded over 100,000 phone directories over the course of four years.

Instead of delivering the phone books, she put the goods into three Las Cruces storage units that were taken out in her name. An attentive worker at the storage facility noticed something was a little off and contacted Directory Plus, who came down hard on Gottrell.

Although she provided no explanation of why she stole so many phone books, Directory Plus owner Hugh Riddle estimates his company lost more than $500,000 from the missing directories.

Ironically, a telephone listing for Gottrell was unavailable.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling Secret Service agents.

Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, CA, was recently indicted for siphoning $50,000 from E*TRADE and Schwab.com over the course of a few months.

Was he falsifying business expenses? Using his financial know-how to bypass controls and cheat the system?

Nope. He got the money by watching cartoons.

The online brokerage houses have a common procedure for new member sign-ups: Users link brokerage accounts to their personal bank accounts, and the companies make a small deposit — between a few pennies and one dollar — into the account.

After users verify the amount of the micro-deposits, their account is fully activated, and money can be moved in and out.

Largent exploited a loophole in this common system and used an automated script to open 58,000 online brokerage accounts. Each was linked to one of five bank accounts, and he withdrew the micro-deposits once they were sent.

Of course, each of the fake accounts required a name, address and Social Security number — that’s where Largent let his creative side shine. He favored cartoon and comic books character names: Mr. Scooby Doo, Mr. Speed Racer and Mr. Johnny Blaze were among the names on the brokerage accounts.

Our favorites: Hank Hill and Rusty Shackelford. Hank Hill is the name of the patriarch on King of the Hill, but Rusty Shackelford is much more devious. That’s the alias used by the paranoid exterminator Dale Gribble of the same show. That’s right, Largent used a cartoon character’s alias as an alias.

Eventually, Secret Service agents noticed more than 5,000 online accounts had been opened with falsified information at Schwab.com in January, 2008. After investigating, agents found 11,385 accounts linked to the same 5 IP addresses — all traced back to Largent’s Internet provider.

After seizing his computer equipment, agents also discovered Largent had tried the same scheme with Google’s Checkout service, filching $88,225.29 from Bancorp Bank.

When asked about his actions, Largent said he’d read the terms and conditions on the companies’ Web sites, but none of them prohibited multiple e-mail addresses or accounts.

And in case you’re wondering where the digital thief learned his skills, a reliable source — Mr. Bullwinkle J. Moose — has informed us he’s a recent alumnus of Wassamatta University.

Joseph Winstead, a postal worker in Washington, D.C., had to serve on a jury in an extended federal trial, so the government paid him his usual salary while he was away from work.

During the few days that the jury was excused, Winstead didn’t report to his normal duties as a mail processor yet continued to receive payment from the government.

So, when Winstead was excused from the jury before deliberations began, he decided to keep the information from his supervisor and remained on his “paid vacation” for the remainder of the trial.

In the end, Winstead played hooky for a total of 144 days, collecting nearly $40,000 in unearned wages from the government. (Actually, there was some work involved — he had to fabricate court paperwork to support his reimbursement claims for the 20-odd weeks he was at home.)

Ready for the part where the supervisor notices something amiss and Winstead gets in trouble?

It didn’t happen for years. The original trial was in 2003, but in 2006, Winstead was called for jury duty again. He decided to press his luck even further, considering how well it’d panned out for him previously.

That’s when the supervisor finally caught on. Winstead plead guilty in a fraud case — ironically, it was in the same federal courthouse where he was supposed to have served so much jury time. He’s likely to be given a prison sentence of 8 to 14 months.

When asked how such a glaring error could have gone unchecked, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gerald McKiernan said the Service was “glad the fraud was detected. The system worked.”

So, fool USPS once, shame on you. Fool them twice … well, the shame’s still on Winstead, apparently.

Sisters Yoshiko Ishii and Hatsue Shimizu of Osaka, Japan were recently arrested under suspicion of hiding a stash (is $56 million still considered a “stash?”) of yen they’d inherited from their father, owner of a prominent real estate investment company.

It was bad enough that they began withdrawing money from their father’s bank accounts years before he’d passed away, but they’d only declared a portion of their eventual inheritance and paid a sliver of the owed tax.

How the government failed to realize that nearly $56 million in business funds virtually dropped off the radar screen is still up for debate.

Under questioning from prosecutors, Ishii admitted to the allegations, while her older sister claimed she’d forgotten about the cash, most of which was socked away in her cramped garage.

Forgot? Yeah, right. We can only imagine how that interview went: “Oh, that $56 million in cash, next to the old freezer, pile of laundry and fourteen brand-new luxury cars … now I remember.”