Movie Prop Cash

ATCHISON, Kan.–A plea agreement reached in a case of embezzlement involving the long-time manager of a credit union here who has entered a guilty plea in a long-running scheme.

According to court documents, Rita Hartman, who was employed by the $6.5 million Muddy River Credit Union for four decades, 30-years of which were spent as manager, entered a guilty plea to making false entries in federal credit institution records, KAIR reported. As part of the plea agreement, the other counts faced by Hartman have dropped. Court records indicate Hartman would face no more than 30-years in prison, a $1 million fine, five years of supervised release, restitution, and a $100 mandatory special assessment.

The report did not indicate the amount of money that was taken.

‘False Payment’

KAIR cited court documents showing the first time Hartman “made a false payment on a family member’s loan or deposited cash into a family member’s account when no actual funds supported the transaction was approximately 15 years ago.”

Prosecutors said Hartman, who also previously served as the mayor of Atchison, would conceal her crimes by reporting “a significantly larger cash on hand balance on the general ledger than the cash on hand reported on call reports,” as well as by inflating on call reports and the general ledger the amount of Security Repurchase Agreements MRCU had at EBT…Hartman was able to hide the increasingly large cash on hand balance listed in the general ledger by offsetting the amount embezzled through non-existent SRA assets.”

The Muddy River Credit Union serves the employees of the Bradken foundry located in Atchison. Its 5300 report indicates MRCU has 728 members. 

Embezzlement Involved Movie Prop Cash

Meanwhile, in Montana, an ex-employee Park Side Credit Union in Missoula, Mont. has been sentenced to six months in prison after admitting to embezzling $389,000 from the vault by swapping real money with fake funds.

Edward Arthur Nurse, 35, of Missoula, pleaded guilty to embezzling money from the credit union, according to NBC Montana.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Montana said Nurse embezzled the funds by swapping real money with fake funds from about July 2023 to June 2024. Prosecutors said a credit union employee discovered $340,000 in cash in the credit union’s vault had been replaced with fake funds from a company that provides fake currency as props for movies and entertainment productions. 

“Nurse used his position as team lead for the vault to swap the credit union’s cash with fake money he purchased specifically for this purpose,” NBC Montana reported. “Nurse hid his conduct from security cameras, auditors and his colleagues by putting real money at the front and back of bundles of fake money. Nurse made multiple purchases of fake money and stole the real cash from his work at different times over a seven-month period.

“After the credit union discovered the thefts, Nurse claimed to an FBI special agent that he did not usually carry much cash and, aside from a vacation to Las Vegas, Nevada, he had not made any recent large purchases or cash deposits,” the report continued. “However, records show that Nurse made at least nine cash deposits of over $10,000 each in 2024 into his personal account. The investigation also determined that during the first six months of 2024, Nurse had purchased $410,000 in fake currency from a prop money company. The credit union was later informed that approximately $50,000 in fake money had been received by the Federal Reserve in July 2024. Those funds were returned and determined to be fake bills from the prop money company.”

CU’s Video Leads to Arrests

Separately, in Taylorsville, Utah, arrests have been made in a skimming operation that affected more than 900 people, mostly from ATMs at 7-Eleven convenience stores.

“Our fraud investigators noticed kind of an uptick in some of our members reporting ATM fraud,” Amanda Morton, the vice president of relationship development at Cyprus Credit Union, was quoted by Fox13Now.com as saying. “That triggered them to do a little bit of investigative work where they started pulling ATM footage and uncovered that it was the same male.”

That investigation led to the arrest of a 17-year-old suspect and his Florin Turtulea and Irina Donica, according to the report. Police said they found skimming devices and SD cards with financial transactions at their home, as well as thousands of dollars of stolen items and more than $40,000 in cash there too. 

Data Cloned on Gift Cards

“These devices that they put on the ATM machines would record the data, all of the person’s personal information data from their card, and they were able to actually clone that card onto like a gift card or something like that, and then go and use that gift card to take out money or buy things, or anything like that,” a police spokesperson told the news outlet.