Igor Vorotinov, 54, has pleaded guilty to faking his death in order to collect a $2 million life insurance payment.
Vorotinov pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in federal district court in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
According to Vorotinov's guilty plea and documents filed in court, in March 2010, Vorotinov obtained a $2 million life insurance policy on his own life from Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company and designated his wife, Irina Vorotinov, as the primary beneficiary.
Prosecutors explained that, on October 1, 2011, the Moldovan police discovered the corpse of an adult male decedent by the side of a road near the Moldovan village of Cojusna. Based on the dead body and Vorotinov's identification documents in its clothing, the Moldovan police and a Moldovan morgue official purported to determine that Vorotinov had died of a heart attack on October 1, 2011.
After his purported death, Vorotinov began using the name “Nikoly Patoka” and lived in Transnistria, a small Russian-controlled region of Moldova, from approximately 2012 until approximately November 2018.
On November 7, 2011, Irina Vorotinov submitted a claim for death benefits under the Mutual of Omaha life insurance policy, claiming that Vorotinov had died in the Republic of Moldova on October 1, 2011.
Vorotinov was aware of the filing of the fraudulent death claim and, therefore, continued living and doing business as “Nikoly Patoka.”
On March 23, 2012, Mutual of Omaha mailed a check payable to Irina Vorotinov in the amount of $2,048,414.09 to her home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
According to documents filed in court, she recruited a third party to open an account at a local branch of U.S. Bank and to deposit the insurance check into the account. She then caused the third party to transfer $1.5 million to another account at U.S. Bank in the name of her son, Alkon Vorotinov.
Between March 29, 2012 and January 2015, more than $1.5 million of the life insurance proceeds were transferred to accounts located in Switzerland and Moldova.
The government said that, on November 27, 2013, Alkon Vorotinov was stopped by Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) in Detroit, Michigan upon returning from a trip to Moldova. A computer seized by CBP agents contained digital photographs of his father, Vorotinov, taken on April 19, 2013 and on May 12, 2013, in which he was alive.
Vorotinov is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29, 2019.
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Victoria Spears
Victoria Prussen Spears is senior vice president of Meyerowitz Communications Inc., a law firm marketing communications consulting company. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn Law School, Ms. Spears was an attorney at a leading New York City law firm before joining Meyerowitz Communications. She may be contacted at [email protected].