King County prosecutors have filed felony theft charges against two former Hopelink employees, who allegedly stole and resold more than $95,000 worth of bus passes between May 2009 and March 2010.

The bus passes were intended to be used for homeless, low-income and disabled people, but prosecutors contend Kimberly Holmes, 48, and Manuel Almagro, 30, stole and resold the passes for a personal profit. The two are not in jail and arraignment is set for May 30, according to the King County Prosecutor’s Office.

According to charging documents, Holmes and Almagro created false client accounts and altered existing client accounts while working at a Bellevue call center “to have the passes mailed to a series of addresses where Almagro arranged for the collection and retrieval of the passes.” Almagro would then sell the bus passes for $50-100 each and share the profits with Holmes, the charging papers stated.

A specific amount of false bus passes was not revealed, but Almagro told detectives that 1,350 fraudulent passes were obtained, according to the charging papers. In addition, Almagro admitted to stealing $200-300 worth of gas cards, according to the charging papers.

Almagro was terminated from the Hopelink call center, located at 14812 Main St. in Bellevue, in June 2009 because of attendance issues, according to the charging documents and Holmes was placed on leave in April 2010 and fired in June 2010 after an internal investigation by the Redmond-based nonprofit charity.

Many of the bus passes were sent to Seattle residences, along with a Renton rental property, which was formerly owned by Almagro, according to charging papers. Two of the tenants who lived at the Renton residence suspected wrongdoing and returned a package of 15 passes back to Hopelink, which provides transportation assistance to low-income and disabled people among other social services on the Eastside.

Almagro told one of the residents that the bus passes were being sent to the Renton address “as an attempt to help homeless people without addresses,” a Bellevue detective wrote in the charging papers. The same resident told detectives that he “watched Almagro open an envelope and sell a pass to one of the females that rented a room from him,” the detective wrote in the charging papers.

Investigators soon revealed that Almagro and Holmes, who blame each other for the crime, were allegedly putting the profits into their own pockets and not helping the homeless.

According to the charging papers, Holmes accused Almagro of being the mastermind behind the scheme and keeping most of the profits. She told detectives that Almagro paid her $40 for each pass she issued at his request, according to charging papers. She claimed to detectives that she made approximately $700 from the total scheme and “did it primarily as a favor to Almagro,” charging papers said. In addition, Holmes told detectives that Almagro “had established an elaborate lifestyle with fancy clothes and new glasses from the money he was making from stolen passes,” according to the charging papers.

Almagro told detectives that initially he set up 15 false accounts, but later admitted to setting up 200-300 fraudulent accounts, according to the charging papers. He also said that Holmes was one who thought up the scheme because “she worked at Hopelink longer,” according to charging papers.

“He at first claimed that he would give the passes to Kim and she would sell them,” a Bellevue detective wrote in the charging papers. “He claimed that he only pocketed $7,000 to $10,000 from money she paid him for the passes and the couple (of passes) that he sold. He later changed his story.”

Hopelink, which is headquartered on Willows Road in Redmond with other offices in Bellevue and Kirkland, has taken action to make sure this type of fraud doesn’t happen again, according to Glen Miller, communications manager for Hopelink.

Miller pointed out that Hopelink established a Report-It Hotline, which is a whistle-blower hotline with anonymous reporting. In addition, the charity has provided anti-fraud training to staff members in the transportation and accounting departments along with strengthening its “internal controls, checks and balances,” Miller said.

Miller added that the theft losses were covered by insurance and “no past or present client has been impacted by their theft.”