Joshua Miller was born into a lower middle$-$class family of five children that didn$$t have much to share with one another in their home in Oneonta, New York. He landed his first job as a paperboy when he was $10.$ As a teenager, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow for neighbors to earn spending money. In high school, he worked as a cook in a restaurant and continued with the same paper route until his graduation in $1996$ when he began working on a business management degree at Niagara University.

By $2004,$ Miller had started working at a New York state$-$licensed hearing aid dispenser and seven years later would become the owner of the company $$ Syracuse Hearing Aid Centers LLC$.$ In $2006,$ he met Christina. They married in $2008$ and later had four children. Miller considered himself the luckiest man in the world.

That luck changed Sept. $14,2016,$ when Onondaga County Court Judge Anthony F$.$ Aloi sentenced Miller to four to $12$ years in state prison for his $2015$ conviction of first$-$ and second$-$degree grand larceny after his guilty plea for his part in defrauding a New York State health insurance program of $$1\mathrm{.}65$ million. $($See Minoa scam artist gets $4$ to $12$ years for faking $$1\mathrm{.}6$ million in hearing aids sales, by Douglass Dowty, Syracuse.com, June $29,2016.)$

How did a hardworking man who built such a great life and family wind up going to state prison? From November $2016$ to February $2017,$ we corresponded with Miller while he was incarcerated at the Mid$-$State Correctional Facility in Marcy, New York. In those letters, he describes his motivations for the crimes he committed and the circumstances that led him down the proverbial slippery slope to becoming a convicted fraudster.

How did Miller become our pen pal? During a $2016$ spring semester fraud examination class at Cornell University, Professor Jack Little $($one of the authors of this article$)$ tasked his students with researching a fraud of their choice. Megan Sutton $($the other author of this article$),$ and her class teammates, investigated Miller$$s case. When Little was grading the team$$s work, he asked Sutton$$s team members, $$So$,$ why did he do it$?$ because they hadn$$t discovered the usual reasons: unshared pressure in family finances or compulsive behaviors such as addictions. As Sutton was returning to Cornell for her final year, she and Little decided to reach out to Miller to dig deeper into the rationale behind the fraud. This article contains their findings. How could fraud have been avoided?

Key internal controls that were violated?

What are the financial implications of the fraud?

Major outcomes?