A trusted jewelry store employee got away with pocketing luxury watches for years, thanks to doctored paperwork, according to investigators in Florida.
The trickery amounted to 36 missing watches valued at over $650,000, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release Thursday.
All were taken from Gold & Diamond Source in Clearwater, which alerted detectives on May 15, the sheriff’s office said.
“Detectives learned the employee, later identified as 32-year-old Michael Kelly, stole several high-end watches from the business between Oct. 31, 2021, and May 3, 2025,” the sheriff’s office said.
“Kelly entered fictitious information into the point-of-sale system, making the business believe a watch sale occurred. Kelly created false sales records indicating a customer traded in a watch and purchased another, however, Kelly would steal a watch from inventory and place it in his suit jacket.”
Surveillance cameras recorded him entering “fictitious trade-in transactions” into the store’s records “with no customer present,” the sheriff’s office said.
Kelly remained on staff through May 10, when his “employment was terminated,” officials said.
Kelly was arrested Thursday and charged with scheme to defraud, the sheriff’s office said.
Details of how the thefts were uncovered were not revealed.
Clearwater is about a 20-mile drive west from downtown Tampa.
