This is small potatoes compared to the rain gauge tampering farmers were doing in Colorado. There was a recent conviction for $6.5 million dollars of fraud against the federal crop insurance program!
We should have much stricter penalties for fraud. Vastly more money is stolen this way than by petty theft or robbery, but the perpetrators tend to get off very lightly by comparison.
Wage theft is the largest form of theft by a wide margin. Everything from not paying people at all for contracted work, forcing people to work overtime without additional pay, structuring contracts/agreements in terms of bonuses that can never be attained with the insane performance requirements, to paying people late.
To be fair, in most states you don't even have to sue to recover back wages. You just file a report with the state labor board, who are empowered to bring legal action on your behalf.
> Wage theft in the U.S. is a massive, underreported problem, with estimates showing employers steal over $15 billion to $50 billion annually from workers. This surpasses the combined value of all reported robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, which totaled significantly less, making wage theft the largest form of theft in the country.
Theft and robbery are not just monetary crimes, that's why the penalties are different.
Theft almost always has a component of violence done or threatened against a person and robbery involves violating a persons formerly thought-to-be safe space. There is a large psychological/emotional component to these more petty crimes. It's mostly not about the money, it's about what you had to do to get it.