I worked at a UK firm that got bought by a massive multinational. Our office had a legal admin who was from South Africa but had lived in the UK for years with no plan to return. She didn't love her job, but her visa was tied to it and it was okay. She was hugely overpaid for her role because because she then fell into some kind of special class of foreign employee who could be sponsored for a visa (I don't really understand it). When all this happened she was literally a couple of weeks off getting a UK passport (which takes 5 years or so). As soon as she got that passport she could basically live and do anything she wanted in Europe.
She met this much older guy (online?) from South Africa and got engaged. Lax supervision from the new employer and several changes of boss in a short period meant that no one was quite sure when she had annual leave, what she was doing, which office she was at, etc. Unknown to the company she took her laptop back to South Africa to be with the guy over Christmas and when she got there he persuaded her to start working for him and not to go back. Rather than work out her notice in the UK, she pretended to her managers (who were not in the UK) that she was in the office, on annual leave, on sick leave, etc. and kept being paid.
She spun a whole load of really crappy lies for literally about 4 months before they eventually fired her. They got more and more ridiculous and included her "friend" contacting the company by SMS to tell them she was in a coma (I was made to send flowers!). Eventually they looked at her company phone records and could prove she had been out of country for months. She was working for her fiance's business so she didn't care.
A few months later they've broken up. She has been out of the UK long enough that she can't now apply for the passport and is unable to come back anyway because she has been fired from the company that was sponsoring her. She can't get a reference from her ex-fiance because that's a mess, and can't get a reference from her previous employer for 5 years because they fired her.
In less than 6 months she went from being hugely overpaid at a massive household-name company and about to get a passport from the country she planned to live in, to being out of work on a different continent with no way to return to home and very limited options for getting a new job.
Last I heard she was self-employed as a Children's entertainer or something.