McDonald's Manager Refunds Herself 1,071 In Big Macs, Gets Caught: Police

GREENFIELD, WI — A McDonald's manager faces a felony theft charge after authorities say she stole more than $3,000 in money from the restaurant in the form of refunds for Big Macs.

Mary Ruelle faces up to a year and a half behind bars or up to $10,000 in fines if she is convicted.

According to a criminal complaint, Greenfield Police reported that they spoke with her supervisor at McDonald's, who said that Ruelle, a manager of the McDonald’s Restaurant on South 76th Street, had been stealing money from the restaurant from mid-January to March 24.

According to a criminal complaint, the amount of the refunds varied from $31.32 on Jan. 14 to $132.62 on March 24, with other refunds as high as $212.20 on March 17. The total amount of the fraudulent refunds between Jan. 14 and March 24 was $3,827.17, according to the complaint.

That amounts to about 1,071 Big Macs.

According to the criminal complaint, Ruelle's manager said that normally a refund would be for a couple of dollars — the cost of a meal or part of a meal. In order to issue a refund, the defendant had to select food items that had been sold that day. In order to get the high dollar amounts that she pretended to refund, the complaint says, she picked a popular food item, for example, Big Macs.

Ruelle's manager told police he reviewed surveillance video and said that Ruelle would authorize refunds and then take the money from the cash register, but there were no customers present at the time. He told police that a refund requires a managers code, which she used.

Image via Wikimedia Commons