Arkansas insurance agent sentenced to federal prison

Berry Roland Bishop has been sentenced by U.S. District Judge Susan O. Hickey in Hot Springs, Ark., to serve 60 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release for his conviction on one felony count of bank fraud.

According to court records, in 2011, Bishop was the president and sole owner of Alliance Insurance Group of Arkadelphia and the president of M&B Insurance Properties Inc. An investigation by the FBI revealed that Bishop had misrepresented his financial condition to induce Citizens Bank to extend him loans that would not have otherwise been authorized.

Prosecutors said that Bishop also forged the signatures of his insurance agency clients to obtain loans from the Bank of Prescott without the authorization or permission of those clients. The fraudulent loans obtained by Bishop exceeded $3.5 million.

The government asserted that to improve the cash flow of his business, Bishop misrepresented his financial condition to induce Citizens Bank to extend him loans. Bishop represented that M&B properties had no liabilities when, in fact, he was concealing an outstanding $150,000 mortgage and an outstanding $150,000 liability for the assignment of rents. Because Bishop misrepresented the liabilities and net value of M&B, he induced Citizens Bank to delay repayment of a $200,000 loan in 2017 and 2018. That loan has never been repaid, prosecutors said.

They also alleged that Bishop induced the Bank of Prescott to extend him loans. Bishop entered into loan agreements on his clients’ behalf without their knowledge or authorization by offering the value their insurance policies as collateral to the Bank of Prescott. In furtherance of this scheme, Bishop forged the signatures of his clients without their knowledge or authorization.

Bishop was named in an information filed in December 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Hot Springs Division. He entered his guilty plea in December 2018.

Related:

• A month in review: Rounding out California’s latest fraudsters
• Excerpts from webcast: How to more effectively use social media to detect fraud
• 8 kinds of employee fraud and how to prevent it

This article first appeared on sister-site Law.com.