Addicted To Embezzling?

Last year, nearly 18,000 people were arrested for stealing from their companies. But Melinda Murphy found out that stealing isn't always about the money.

A woman Murphy met doesn't think of herself as a thief, even though she says she's embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. More than anything, she wants to stop, but says she can't, because stealing has become an addiction.

She asked Murphy to protect her identity, so The Early Show altered her appearance.

"This is not something I'm proud of," says the woman, dubbed "Lisa" by Murphy. "This is not something I set out to do. It's just like this urge inside of me that's just uncontrollable. and it just takes over."

Lisa, a wife and mother, says she's stolen from every job she's had since college, nine companies in all.

Why is she stealing?

"I don't know exactly. Sometimes it's a matter of, I felt I was wronged in some way, and this was my way of getting back at them."

"But it became more than just trying to get even?" Murphy asked.

"Yes, it did. Why, I don't know. It just did, and the more I did it, the more it progressed, and the harder it got to stop."

It started small, Murphy points out. A dollar here, a dollar there. But it grew, until it became what Lisa calls an addiction.

"When you first steal," Murphy wondered, "is there a little bit of a high there?"

"Yes, there is," Lisa answered. "Your heart really is going very, very fast and, for a few minutes, you get that feeling of satisfaction, that you're smarter than they are.

"(And then) you walk out and that guilt just overtakes you. Just overtakes you. (Yet), I keep stealing."

Lisa, a bookkeeper, figures it was tens of thousands of dollars, money she says she didn't need and never planned to steal.

"Embezzlement takes a huge toll," points out Terry Shulman, a consultant on employee theft who counsels addicted embezzlers and wrote, "Biting the Hand That Feeds."

"It definitely is in the billions of dollars a year," he says, adding that this kind of embezzling is different than most employee theft, because the average thief doesn't feel guilty about stealing, while those addicted usually do."Couldn't this just be an excuse for somebody who wants to steal?" Murphy inquired.

"It could be," Shulman replied. "But very often, the people I work with are actually very remorseful, very ashamed of what they do. They know the difference between right and wrong."

"Is it about the money, or the rush?"

"For some people, it may start off as being about the money. It's almost a cry for help for many people, until they get caught and confronted and actually deal with their anger, their feelings of entitlement, the family issues, their lack of appropriate stress-coping skills, whatever it is making them tick."

Lisa says she was forced to face her reality when she was caught at her last job: "I went into this hysterics, sheer hysterics, right there (on the street). And driving home was difficult, because I was just shaking, shaking so uncontrollably, crying hysterically, not knowing where to turn, because nobody knew I was doing this."

When her husband learned the truth, he threw her out, Murphy reports. "Lisa wound up in a shelter, but eventually, her husband took her back.

"We went through counseling, and we're OK," she says, "but he does not want to talk about this at all. This is a very sore topic with us."

Lisa's husband knows she stole from one company, but not the other eight.

"He knows nothing," she says, choking up. "That's why this is so hard. If he ever found out, I'm toast."

Says Shulman, "If you can't tell your family, honestly, that's not ideal. One of my favorite sayings is, 'You're only as sick as your secrets.' But as we work together, and as they get further in recovery. very often they'll hit a point where they will realize they have to come clean."

Lisa confides she's still afraid of so much: holding a job, losing her family, or even worse.

"By doing this interview, you could end up in jail?" Murphy asked.

"Yeah."

"So why risk it all then?"

"It's something that needs to be told. I want everybody to know that I'm not doing this out of greed. I'm doing this because it's a problem. It's a disease. It's a condition."

Lisa isn't working now, Murphy says, but she is in therapy, and in an online support group, and she's on special medication, to help overcome this addiction.

Shulman says these addicts can work again, adding Lisa might need to work for a company that knows about her background and puts in the proper safeguards, to make sure she doesn't steal again.

He even suggests it could be good for a an embezzler to use his or her knowledge for good, as in the movie, "Catch Me If You Can."