A Gainesville2Go employee was arrested Friday after officers said he wrote $40,000 worth of fraudulent checks.
Gainesville Police charged 22-year-old Michael David Tatum on charges of grand theft and uttering a forged instrument, according to an arrest report.
Jeremiah Loper, general manager of Gainesville2Go, said in a phone interview that he and owner Andrew Gorrelick were reviewing business records when they noticed a series of forged checks, the first of which was written on Dec. 2.
Tatum, an employee of two years, was fired in mid-December. Loper said Tatum made several excuses for the missing funds, including that he used the money to fix the company car and to pay for cancer treatment.
Tatum told police Gainesville2Go is an “open business” and employees regularly write their own paychecks from the business account, according to the report.
During questioning, Tatum told police he wrote $1,500 in fake checks to pay for his medical bills, according to the report.
Loper said in the merchant account alone, Tatum wrote about $5,000 worth of checks, including one to his mom for a few hundred dollars.
Officers booked Tatum into the Alachua County Jail. He was released Saturday.
A version of this story ran on page 10 on 1/6/2014 under the headline "‘Ex-worker defrauds"
