This column typically focuses on insurance fraud trends, developments, and cases from New York. Insurance fraud, however, goes well beyond this geographical area, and sometimes involves unusual, even bizarre, facts. Locally, Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice recently brought charges against Raymond Roth for allegedly conspiring with his son to fake his own drowning death in the ocean off Jones Beach in a bid to secure hundreds of thousands of dollars in life insurance benefits for family members.1 In another local matter, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced charges against three insurance agents who allegedly orchestrated a $100 million insurance fraud scheme involving stranger-owned life insurance policies. The comments in that matter by Janice Fedarcyk, who then was FBI assistant director-in-charge of the New York office, apply to all insurance fraud matters, whether big or small, unique or common: “…the insurers were not the only victims. Inevitably, insurance fraud results in higher costs to consumers.”2
Slip and Fall
Consider, for example, the charges brought recently by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley against Jeffery Bannon, a former employee of Magna Carta Companies, also known as Public Service Mutual Insurance Company, and Steven Cournoyer. In a statement, Coakley stated that her office alleged “that these defendants conspired to defraud an insurance company of thousands of dollars for their own personal benefit.”3
