A Wauwatosa man who spent eight years working at Milwaukee Tool just found out that loyalty on a resume does not count for much when you also happen to be running a side business shipping the company’s own products to your apartment. Matthew Yang, 31, was sentenced to five years in prison and five years of extended supervision after a judge found him guilty of felony theft involving property worth more than $100,000.
The scheme itself sounds almost too bold to be real. Yang worked in the IT department at Milwaukee Tool, headquartered in Brookfield, and used his access to the company’s ordering system to create fake orders, ship them to himself, and then quietly delete the paper trail. Between March 2024 and March 2025, he pulled this off 115 times, reported Fox 6. Of those orders, 109 actually got delivered before anyone noticed a problem.
What finally blew the whole thing open was almost comically simple. A freight shipping company called Milwaukee Tool’s customer service line to confirm a delivery address for roughly 9,000 pounds of tools headed to a Wauwatosa apartment complex. Nine thousand pounds is not a typo. That is somewhere north of four tons of drills, saws, and whatever else Milwaukee Tool makes, all bound for one guy’s apartment. Somebody on the phone must have paused and thought, that seems like a lot of tools for one apartment, and they would have been right.
Investigators later found a spreadsheet on Yang’s work laptop titled “selling list,” which suggests this was not just a personal tool collection getting slightly out of hand. He was ordered to pay Milwaukee Tool $1.08 million in restitution, on top of the prison time, and the company says the total value of everything he ordered came out to about $1.44 million before they managed to cancel and recover a handful of shipments.
How Nobody Noticed for a Full Year
It is fair to ask how a scheme this large ran for a full year without tripping any alarms. Large companies process a lot of orders, and one employee quietly deleting his own fraudulent entries from the system is the kind of thing that slips through if nobody is specifically looking for it. The activity reportedly spiked in early 2025, right around the time Milwaukee Tool was planning to end its employee discount program, suggesting Yang may have wanted one last haul before the door closed.
Our Take: Employee discount programs exist so workers can buy a tool or two at a fair price, not so someone can run a personal freight operation out of a corporate warehouse. A little oversight on large or repeated orders probably would have caught this months earlier and saved everybody a headache.
The Cost of Getting Caught
Yang pleaded no contest to five of the fourteen charges originally filed against him, and the remaining nine were dismissed but read in at sentencing.
Between the prison sentence, the extended supervision, and over a million dollars in restitution, this stands as a reminder that inside access is not the same thing as ownership, no matter how many boxes get delivered to your front door.