Pizza Hut Manager Caught Stealing $24K Through Fake Delivery Refunds

On November 14, 2025, Brendan T. Coyle — a 34-year-old Pizza Hut general manager at the Brittain Road location in Akron, Ohio, operating under franchisee Buckeye Pie Holdings LLC — pleaded guilty to two felony counts including theft under Ohio Revised Code § 2913.02(A)(1) and tampering with records under ORC § 2913.42, after a loss prevention investigation revealed he had processed 312 fraudulent refund tickets totaling $24,178.42 between January 2023 and October 2024. Coyle used his manager-tier POS override PIN to generate cash refunds tied to fabricated customer complaints — wrong toppings, undelivered orders, cold food — entering most of them in the final 30 minutes before close and pocketing the cash during his own end-of-shift drawer reconciliation. To absorb the volume of fraudulent tickets, he routed the fake complaints through the deactivated driver accounts of two former employees, J.M. and K.R., who had quit in November 2022 and knew nothing about it until detectives called them nearly two years later. The scheme was flagged only after a newly hired regional operations director noticed the Brittain Road store's refund rate ran at 4.1 percent of delivery revenue while the franchise's other ten locations averaged 0.9 percent. Sentenced January 22, 2026, by Hon. Margaret L. Holcomb to 14 months at Lorain Correctional Institution plus full restitution of $24,178.42, Coyle was also permanently barred from cash-handling employment. One of the drivers whose name absorbed 22 months of fabricated theft complaints is now a plumber's apprentice and had no idea his former coworker had been pinning hundreds of fake deliveries to his name. - - Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.