DANVILLE, Va. – A former head teller at a Danville credit union pleaded guilty on Monday to swapping out hundreds of thousands of dollars of real money with fake bills.
Jorge Omar Navarro, 30, pleaded guilty one count of embezzlement and one count of using counterfeit currency with the intent to commit fraud.
In 2018, he worked at a branch of URW Federal Credit Union. There, he had access to the vault and the authority to order money for the branch, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
That September, he disappeared after taking $600,000 in cash from the vaults and replacing it with counterfeit bills.
Below is 10 News archive footage that aired on Oct. 4, 2018, about the search for Navarro:
“This defendant used his position of trust within the credit union to gain access to large sums of money only to abuse that trust in the name of greed,” said U.S. Attorney Chris Kavanaugh of the Western District of Virginia. “Fortunately, the men and women of the Danville Police Department acted swiftly and were able to keep all of the counterfeit bills in this case from making their way into circulation.”
He remained on the run until March 2021, when Durham, North Carolina, police responded to a report of shots fired and found a man covered in blood who claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint.
Police executed a search warrant for the area and found multiple guns, kilograms of cocaine and marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and $74,000 in cash.
The man later confessed to being Navarro, telling authorities he earned the money by selling drugs and told them his true identity, admitting that he had been using an alias since leaving Virginia.
During Wednesday’s court proceedings, Navarro also pleaded guilty to one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine and one count of possession of firearms in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime for his conduct in Durham.
At sentencing, he faces a minimum of ten years in prison and a maximum penalty of life.