SEATTLE — A Tulalip Tribes member was sentenced Friday, Jan. 8, to three months in prison and three years of supervised release after he stole nearly $20,000 in customer rewards from the Tulalip Resort and Casino.

Walter Anthony Moses, a former supervisor at the casino, was also ordered to pay $19,994 in restitution during his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

According to court records, a casino investigation into Moses showed that the 28-year-old had debited rewards points from a number of customer accounts and issued vouchers to his friends and relatives.

Those vouchers were cashed in, and part of those funds were returned to Moses.

Common to casinos, customer rewards points can be redeemed for merchandise, food or cash.

According to a release by the U.S. Department of Justice, Moses was initially asked by the casino to look into a $500 discrepancy in a patron’s rewards account.

Moses allegedly did not address that issue, and it was only after a second casino employee investigated the account that Moses’ scheme was discovered.

An initial casino investigation found that Moses issued 18 rewards vouchers worth nearly $8,000 to non-customers during a five-day span in May 2008.

Further investigations showed that Moses, who was captured on video surveillance cameras working on a casino computer terminal and then providing vouches to a relative, had begun stealing from customer accounts in January 2008.

Moses was fired on May 22, 2008. He was indicted in May 2009 and entered a guilty plea in September 2009.

The case was investigated by the FBI and the Tulalip Police Department.