In March, former financial secretary Crystina Renee Bock pleaded guilty to stealing more
than $200,000 from the weekly offerings made by congregants at
Compass Bible Church in Aliso Viejo.
Today, the 34-year-old Ladera Ranch resident learned her sentence.
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For pleading guilty March 16 to 62 felony counts of grand theft with sentencing
enhancement and allegations for aggravated white collar crime exceeding
$100,000 and losses over $100,000, Bock was sentenced to five
years in state prison and ordered to pay over $200,000 in
restitution.
She began working as the church's part-time financial secretary on June 1, 2005, and helped with accounting for offerings and payments made congregants. She also prepared the church's weekly deposits,
updated the electronic financial records, and sent contribution
statements to the congregants documenting their donations for tax
purposes.
But from about the time she started through September 2008, Bock took more than 440 donation checks and deposited them into her personal account–and altered the church's financial records to hide her thefts.
The Orange County Sheriff's Department was called in September 2008 after the church's financial supervisors discovered a $1,000 check donated by a congregant had been cashed but was not deposited into the church's account, as
recorded by Bock.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.