A grand jury has handed down one of the largest embezzlement indictments in Fairfax County’s history.

The case is against Carlos Camacho, who is accused of stealing millions of dollars from his employer, A&A Investment LLC, a local small business, between June 2017 and December 2020. Camacho allegedly stole the money by forging a power of attorney document to take out loans on different company properties and by redirecting company income for personal use.

Camacho has been indicted on 15 counts of embezzlement and four counts of forgery, and the total fraud is believed to be in the millions of dollars, one of the largest embezzlement cases in recent county history, according to Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano.

“A case this large coming out of the county courthouse really doesn’t have much of an analog compared to prior years,” Descano told DCist/WAMU. “Typically, the embezzlement cases that are seen out of this courthouse are $100,000, $200,000, and this is millions of dollars.”

Descano said investigators with the Fairfax County Police Department and the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office are still scrutinizing bank records, and are likely to find more fraud as they do so.

“Right now, we’re at a multimillion dollar fraud loss,” he said. “As we go through more records, that number is only anticipated to grow.”

The case does not have a trial date yet due to a pandemic-related backlog in the county court system, and likely won’t have one for several months.

White collar crime is difficult to investigate and prosecute because of the complexity of the schemes and the challenge of following the paper trail — often complicated bank records — to detect criminal activity, according to Descano, who worked on federal embezzlement and other white collar crime cases at the U.S. Justice Department before being elected Commonwealth’s Attorney in 2019.

“I heard a lot from our business communities that under prior administrations that they felt that these types of cases were given short shrift and that nobody really cared because they were financial crimes,” Descano said. “I want our business community to know that we care. We understand that financial crimes are serious and they can have a devastating effect on family and the business that they spent years building.”

Conservatives in Fairfax County — and state Attorney General Jason Miyares — have criticized Descano and other Northern Virginia prosecutors for reform-minded policies that seek to divert people accused of low-level crimes from the criminal justice system rather than aggressively prosecuting them.

Descano said the embezzlement case is emblematic of his office’s strategy of “treating serious crime seriously.”

“We mean all serious crime, including this type of white collar crime that, quite frankly, a lot of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors don’t have the expertise or the patience to take on,” he said. “At the same time, we are treating crimes that are lower level in a way that is different. We’re trying to help those individuals break the cycle of recidivism. We’re trying to get them services and help so they don’t climb the ladder of crime to dangerous crime. So really this idea that soft on crime or what have you is totally false.”