He Defrauded Cisco In An $800,000 Scheme. How Craig Stanland Now Tries To Lead A Better Life.

'Our greatest adversities do not have to be the end,' says Craig Stanland, who spent time in prison for defrauding Cisco.

One of the most terrifying experiences of Craig Stanland’s life came in the form of a voicemail. An FBI agent called to tell Stanland, then a senior enterprise account manager with Cisco partner NEC, about a warrant for his arrest.

Stanland would go on to plead guilty in 2014 to one count of mail fraud for running an $800,000 computing networking parts scheme, fraudulently getting about 600 Cisco parts and selling them to third parties for his own enrichment. He was 40 years old.

“I was sentenced to two years of federal prison, three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay restitution,” Stanland recently told a room of solution providers and vendors. “I lost my marriage. I lost my career. I lost any money I had. Any homes. And I lost so much more.”

$800,000 Cisco Scheme

Stanland–now an author and motivational speaker–shared his story as part of CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange NexGen 2024 event, which took place last month in Houston. He explained to the room that he wants people to know “our greatest adversities do not have to be the end.”

“In fact, they can be our greatest beginnings and our greatest teachers,” he said.

CRN has reached out to Cisco, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice for comment.

Dawn Sizer, CEO of Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based 3rd Element Consulting–a member of CRN’s 2024 MSP500–told CRN in an interview that Stanland’s talk made her think that reinvention is inevitable and that people “should look to it as an opportunity.”

“The MSP business moves at a velocity that forces us to reinvent who we are, who our business is and how we interact with clients regularly,” Sizer said.

Stanland told the crowd that during his nearly yearlong fraud scheme, he ignored an inner voice telling him to stop thousands of times and made thousands of choices to keep the scheme going. A factor in him perpetuating the crime was feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness that he said “is something I still struggle with to this day.” The extra money from the scheme and luxury items he purchased “is what I thought I had it to do to feel enough, to feel worthy, to feel adequate, to be accepted by others.”

Other factors that led to him to committing fraud included disliking his job, ignoring aspirations to write a book and a change in the market affecting his commission checks and hindering his lifestyle.

“I was living so inauthentically and living out of fear,” he said. “There is a significant price to pay for that. And that was that mental prison cell of shame.”

The former account manager picked up meditation in prison. When a longtime friend visited him in prison, Stanland could finally see that relationships matter more in life than careers and material goods. “It was from this day forward that I began reinventing my life after prison,” he said.

In the 10 years since Stanland’s guilty plea, crime hasn’t left the channel–not even the Cisco ecosystem. In May, a Miami-based CEO of a number of tech companies was sentenced to more than six years in prison for running an extensive operation selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to many buyers, with some of the fake gear ending up in U.S. government systems and classified information systems.

His advice to those in attendance was to exercise fears–Stanland overcame a fear of public speaking and overcame self-doubts about his writing abilities and published a book.

His path to reinvention has had ups and downs, he said. He still has imposter syndrome and recalled constantly trying various self-help methods in short bursts and feeling shame when he would quit them. “I was chasing all of these things, and I said, ‘I’m done,’” Stanland said. “I walked off that self-help treadmill, and my heart spoke. And it changed my life with these four very simple words. (It) told me to ‘stop chasing’ and ‘start creating.’”

He recommended audience members find a mission, a reason to carry their burdens, reasons to take a leap. A mission that helped Stanland finish his book was thinking about even one person his book could help.

“The most unstoppable missions that I know of are missions that are in support of something more significant than yourself because when you work on a mission more significant than yourself, you're no longer carrying those burdens for you,” he said. “You carry them for someone else. And it's amazing, they become a whole lot lighter.”

He told the audience to trust themselves, saying that he had to rebuild trust in himself after prison even around simple decisions such as what to eat for a meal.

“When you make and keep commitments to yourself, you become the person who does what they say they are going to do, and you know you can rely on yourself,” he said.