Most Brazen
Under the Most Brazen heading was a 57-year-old Herkimer County man charged in December 2009 with wrongfully receiving nearly $47,000 in workers' compensation benefits while working as a disc jockey for a Utica strip club. The ill-gotten monies spanned five years, but the case itself dated back to an accident two-decades old. "[The defendant]was injured in 1986 while working as a painter for a Central New York cheese company, and he has previously denied in three separate written statements to the State Insurance Fund (SIF) that he had returned to work," a Utica, New York news article on the case quoted officials as saying.
Laziest
The Laziest Award was won by a former teacher who left the profession and went on to be a happy camper. A 56-year-old Ulster County woman supposedly suffered injuries which left her "totally disabled" and forced her to leave her teaching position in the Kingston, New York, school district in 2005. She was arrested in October 2009 "for accepting $73,000 in workers' compensation benefits while she worked at a youth sports camp." The benefits she allegedly received under false pretenses were paid through Ulster County, whose self-insured workers' compensation plan covers Kingston School District employees.
Most Heartless
Three workers' compensation fraudsters were awarded Most Heartless, all with a "Norman Bates-Psycho" slant.
A 34-year-old Rochester, New York, man's mother kept showing motherly love, even after death. The man did not share the sad news of his mother's death with the State Insurance Fund (SIF) when she died in April 2007. His mother had been collecting workers' compensation benefits through SIF, and the checks just kept on coming. Investigators allege that the grieving son fraudulently collected and cashed checks made payable to his late mother between April 2007 and August 2008. He was eventually arrested on grand larceny charges.
Another grieving offspring, this one a 31-year-old West Seneca, New York, woman, endorsed and cashed four workers' compensation checks totaling $1,600 that had been mailed to her mother. The problem was, her mother died in February 2009, and all of those workers' compensation checks in question arrived after her demise.
A 53-year-old Niverville, New York, woman was arrested in June 2009 for cashing $5,599 in disability checks mailed to her sister, who had been dead for two years. The defendant was able to get away with the scheme, which involved not reporting her late sister's death to the disability insurer, for some time because she was her sister's caregiver and held her power of attorney.
In its report to the Governor for the 2008 calendar year, the Insurance Frauds Bureau stated that its investigations led to a total of 755 arrests for insurance fraud and related crimes that year, the highest number recorded since 2004. The number of criminal convictions obtained by prosecutors in Frauds Bureau cases totaled 402 during 2008.
The Bureau's Major Case Unit, which handles complex cases involving no-fault, commercial rate evasion, health-care fraud and workers' compensation premium fraud, effected 126 arrests in 2008. In the workers' compensation insurance fraud arena, the Bureau reported that it opened 445 cases, culminating in 159 arrests in 2008. The report for 2009 is expected to be released shortly.
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