Hospital employee arrested for allegedly using stolen credit card information

A local hospital employee was arrested Wednesday on felony and misdemeanor charges for allegedly using other employees' credit card information to purchase items and pay personal bills.

Daijha Unjanea Taylor, 25, who lists an address on Springwood Road, was arrested shortly after 4:30 p.m. on warrants for two counts of theft with a fine of over $1,000, each punishable by up to six years in prison, and two misdemeanor counts arrested for fraudulent use of a credit or debit card, each punishable by up to one year in prison.

Taylor was later released on $7,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in Garland County District Court on Oct. 4. According to court records, she does not report a criminal history, but she is charged with theft of property under $1,000 stemming from an Aug. 5 arrest.

According to probable cause affidavits, three employees at CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs, 300 Werner St., reported around 8:30 p.m. Aug. 21 that their credit or debit cards had been used at various online locations at some point that day be.

All three discovered that they still had their cards, which were secured behind a locked door and only other hospital employees had access to them. Their shifts had stretched from the night of August 20th to this morning.

An employee reported discovering nine transactions totaling $2,920.98. The transactions included two rental payments, one insurance payment, four purchases at a sporting goods store, one payment to a pawn shop and one purchase at an electronics store.

Hot Springs Police Detective Matthew Cheatham responded to the pawn shop and spoke with an employee who searched their records and found a receipt for the transaction made there. He established it was an online payment for a pawned item and produced a copy of the receipt which allegedly listed Daijha Taylor at her then address in Malvern.

Cheatham spoke with the hospital staff supervisor, who informed him that Taylor was an employee of the hospital and showed her her time card, which showed that she had started work at 6:42 p.m. on August 20th and was scheduled to return on the 21st. He left work at 1:50 a.m. on August 1st.

On August 29, another CHI St. Vincent employee filed a complaint alleging that she worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on August 27 and discovered after leaving work that her credit cards were in her wallet “again.” ” “were plugged in in the wrong place,” so she “suspected something might have happened.”

The next day, August 28, there were reportedly three transactions on her account, two payments to a telephone company totaling $190.76 and one to a local tire dealer totaling $255.86.

The tire dealer was subpoenaed to obtain information related to the payment using the victim's card. The store said Daijha Taylor made the payment to her account over the phone using the victim's card information.

The victim later told police she saw Taylor, a co-worker, in the break room on August 27 and noticed that Taylor wasn't supposed to be working there that day.

After further investigation, arrest warrants were issued for Taylor on September 3rd and September 13th.