Temporary Employee Charged with Stealing $5,000 in Gift Cards from Burnsville Business

A Hopkins man has been charged with stealing more than $5,000 in gift cards from a Burnsville business while working there as a temporary employee.

Matthew Lee Gutzmer, 30, is charged with felony theft, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

According to the criminal complaint, employees of an unnamed Burnsville business reported to police on May 29 that a number of prepaid Visa gift cards were missing.

An employee told police that the cards, which were valued from $100 to $300, were used for various business purposes, and that only one employee had access to them. That employee kept the cards in sequential order.

Business owners had been updating the company’s computer system and had hired two employees from a temporary agency. Those two employees, one of whom was Gutzmer, were in the building after hours and had access to restricted areas, according to the police report.

The woman who kept track of the gift cards told police that when she noticed that the sequence numbers on the gift cards were off, she checked more closely and discovered that a number of cards were missing, and the stack had been “back filled” with blank store gift cards.

The employee said she got a list of all the cards that the business had purchased, and found that the majority of the cards had been registered to and spent by Gutzmer and his girlfriend, who is not named in the complaint and has not been charged. The employee provided a spreadsheet showing the value of the stolen cards and screen shots showing the cards registered to Gutzmer and his girlfriend and the purchases made.

Police obtained surveillance video of Gutzmer using one of the stolen cards at a gas station on County Road 42 in Burnsville, according to the complaint. Officers executed a search warrant at his Hopkins home and found 32 prepaid Visa gift cards, bound together in a locked box in a closet, along with receipts for purchases made with the cards, the complaint charges.

The value of the stolen cards was $5,275, and police seized $3,775 of cards at Gutzmer’s home, according to the complaint.

Police interviewed Gutzmer’s girlfriend, who said Gutzmer had given her the prepaid gift cards and that she had used them to buy household items. She said she didn’t know they were stolen, according to the complaint.

Gutzmer is free on his promise to make all future court appearances. An omnibus hearing in his case is scheduled Oct. 30 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.