Church treasurer steals funds from chapel, spends most of it on porn

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A church treasurer has been arrested for stealing funds from the chapel he served in, and spending a large portion of it on pornography.

Glenn Yothers, 56, admitted to unlawfully taking more than $150,000 (nearly P7.28 million) from the St. Paul Lutheran Church in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, according to court documents obtained by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on March 9.

Yothers was first approached by the church’s council members in 2019 for unpaid bills and deposits that have not been transferred to the church accounts, trooper Robert Politowski said.

“At one point, the utilities of the church were shut off and the church almost shut down due to Yothers not paying bills,” Politowski said in the report.

At the time, Yothers did not admit to any wrongdoing. He claimed he was paying the bills with his personal account and was simply reimbursing himself. But the financial problems persisted until he was eventually removed as treasurer.

The crime was only exposed in the church’s recent audit of the years 2015 to 2019, said the report. It was discovered that the suspect deposited money from the church’s funds into his personal accounts.

When he was questioned by authorities on Jan. 21, he insisted on his story of “reimbursing” funds. But he later admitted to the crime when the police presented evidence of transactions from his debit card to a pornographic website called “Flirt for Free.”

Yothers claimed that he did not give donations to the organization behind “Flirt for Free” but instead made his donations “to individual people” on the website, as written in the court documents.

“Yothers stated he started this with the best intentions because he wanted to help people, but it snowballed out of control,” Politowski added.

An official for the congregation declined to comment on the arrest but said the church council will discuss the issue. Yothers was charged with theft by deception and theft by unlawful taking. Dana Cruz/JB

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