Woman Fakes Kidnapping To Avoid Paying Employees, Cops Say

A California business owner is accused of going to great lengths when she didn’t have the funds to pay her employees, even faking her own kidnapping.

Police in Fresno say that Maria Gonzalez, 33, made up a story about being kidnapped at gunpoint by masked African-American men at an intersection on Saturday afternoon. She claimed she stopped at the intersection so two dogs could cross the road and that’s when she said the men entered her car, ABC News reported. She said they forced her to drive and claimed to have blacked out at some point before waking up by a home in another town located about 20 miles away, with her hands tied and a rag in her mouth, KFSN-TV in Fresno reported. She claimed that $9,000 she needed to pay her two subcontractors by the weekend had been stolen from her.

"She gave extreme details in terms of how she was able to get out of the back seat, how she was able to unlock the door-- all of those things she gave in detail but then there were a lot of things that she was unable to provide," Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer at a press release. He thinks she made the whole story up because she didn’t have the money necessary to pay her staff.

Police say Gonzalez eventually admitted to making up the story during their interview with her, according to ABC News.

Detectives say they are drafting an arrest warrant for Gonzalez for filing a false police report, a misdemeanor charge.

"The truth is Maria Gonzalez made up this entire story for the purpose of letting someone know that $9,000 had been stolen from her — $9,000 she was supposed to pay to subcontractors,"  Dyer told The Fresno Bee.

[Photo: Fresno Police Department]