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Georgia Superior Court Chief Judge W. Fletcher Sams in Fayetteville sentenced a former vice president and senior regional manager of the $532 million Southern Credit Union last week to 20 years, with the first three years to be served in prison and the balance on probation.
Gregory Ryan Edge pleaded guilty to 24 counts of theft by taking by a fiduciary, David Studdard, chief assistant district attorney of the Griffin Judicial Circuit District, said.
Edge was arrested in 2021 after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation determined he stole in excess of $40,000 from more than 22 credit union members from 2013 to 2019. He pilfered from some of these members many times, police investigators said.
Edge, who was fired in 2019, worked at the credit union for about seven years. His total compensation was $135,792 in 2018, according to Southern CU's 990 Form filed with the IRS.
During a recent court hearing, Edge gave no reason why he stole the funds or how he spent the money, Studdard said. The former credit union executive has paid restitution to the credit union's insurance company.
After detecting suspicious activity on some loans, Southern CU, based in Fayetteville, contacted law enforcement authorities.
According to police investigators, most of the thefts involved a loan refinancing scheme, which Edge used to create payoff checks that included amounts of more money than what was required to close the old loans.
Edge took these checks to a teller and kept the excess amounts for himself.
He allegedly told some members that the excess amount was to pay a credit union loan fee, though he never told other members what the excess amount was for until they later discovered the discrepancies, police investigators said.
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