A former Miami-Dade bank teller convicted of cashing more than $1 million in Medicare payments to a local medical equipment supplier will spend almost 3 ½ years in prison.

Michelle Torres, 31, who worked at Bank of America's Sky Lake office, was also sentenced for fleeing South Florida for the Dominican Republic after she was indicted in June 2007. Her prison term, imposed Friday, included 10 months for the fugitive offense.

According to a conspiracy indictment, Torres used her position as the teller coordinator to allow Juan A. Zaragoza and Angel Hernandez Quesada -- the owners of S.Y.C. Home Medical Equipment -- to make large, unreported cash withdrawals from their company's two bank accounts in 2006. They have been sentenced, respectively, to 2 ½ and 4 ½ years, for defrauding $1.8 million from the taxpayer-funded government healthcare program.

In exchange for her bank services, Torres took cash payments from the medical equipment owners, the indictment says.

She also allowed relatives to make withdrawals from the S.Y.C. bank accounts and falsified reporting documents to make it look like others had made the withdrawals, the indictment says.

After Torres fled to the Dominican Republic in 2007, she went to work as a teller for a bank in Santo Domingo, where fellow employees confronted her after spotting her photo in a gallery of Medicare fraud fugitives on The Miami Herald's website.

She then told the bank manager about her past, which led to her surrender to the FBI. Agents brought her back to Miami in January to face charges in federal court.

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