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The manager of a Home Depot store in Miami-Dade, Mauricio Jiménez, was arrested this Tuesday, accused of orchestrating a sophisticated fraud scheme that caused the retail chain millions in losses over more than two years.
Jiménez, 48 years old and residing in Hialeah, faces charges of grand theft in the first degree exceeding $100,000 and organized fraud of $50,000 or more.
The defendant was arrested in the store located at 7899 West Flagler Street, in West Miami-Dade, where he was the manager. In his position, he was authorized to approve price adjustments, including discounts, and had access to the internal sales and inventory systems.
According to the arrest report from the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office, Jiménez processed at least 4,500 distinct orders with unauthorized discounts between December 2023 and April 2026, resulting in gross sales of around 55 million dollars linked to irregular discounts.
After applying discounts of approximately 24 million dollars, net sales were around $30 million, resulting in a negative margin of -$4.3 million for the company.
The arrest report summarizes it clearly: "Not only was there no profit from those sales, but they cost Home Depot over four million dollars to sell to those accounts."
The fraud scheme implemented by Jiménez involved offering "excessively high" discounts to a select group of recurring accounts linked to resellers, on items such as power tools and sink garbage disposals, deliberately structuring the transactions to evade the company's internal detection thresholds.
Before serving as the manager of the Home Depot on West Flagler Street, Jiménez had held the same position at the branch located at 13895 West Okeechobee Road in Hialeah Gardens.
Researchers from Home Depot Central Investigations determined that the high discount activity ceased at the previous store where Jiménez worked as soon as he left and surged when he arrived at his new branch.
To conceal his actions, Jiménez created, registered, or used additional business entities, shell companies, and aliases in order to place orders and receive discounted merchandise, according to the arrest report.
The investigation was initiated in December 2025 by Home Depot's Assurance Management and Advisory program, which detected suspicious orders at the Hialeah Gardens store. The inquiries also revealed that a regional vice president and a district manager had previously warned Jiménez to stop selling to seven affiliated businesses, but he continued with the fraudulent transactions.
The fraud resulted in direct personal benefits for him: by exceeding his sales targets thanks to the scheme, Home Depot rewarded him with larger bonuses.
"The accused participated in a deliberate, continuous, and sophisticated scheme to defraud Home Depot over a period of approximately two and a half years, resulting in a substantial financial loss," stated the report.
Jiménez appeared before a judge on Wednesday, who set a bail of $15,000 and ordered him to stay away from the establishment. As of noon today, he remained incarcerated at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
The case stands out for its level of sophistication within a broader pattern of internal fraud in large retail chains. Last February, a former Home Depot employee in Georgia was sentenced to over three years in federal prison for stealing more than four million dollars in gift cards between 2020 and 2021, taking advantage of reduced oversight during the pandemic.
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