CEUnits Blog

Insurance Scam Fails


April 23rd, 2015

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Fraudulent insurance claims are increasing on a daily basis. In most cases, criminals are turning to this form of felony as a form of making illegal income. It’s very hard to get away with an insurance scam. Here are some high profile instances of insurance scams that have failed:

House on Fire
Mark Thompson, an executive in Chicago had accumulated a lot of debt in Chicago. He burned down his house out of desperation. So he essentially burned down his house hoping for $730,000 in insurance money. Furthermore, to make it appear as a suicide he convinced his 90-year-old mother Carmen to go downstairs, and then doused his own basement with an accelerant and tossed the match to get the fire started. Well Thompson’s idea fell flat and now he’s been given 190 years in federal prison.

Slip and Fall
Isabel Parker is known as the queen of the slip-and-fall scam. The 72-year-old scammer prostrated herself in several department stores, supermarkets and liquor stores. She has fell a total of 49 different times and she filed for claims totaling over $500,000. Her slip-and-fall scam is a sad byproduct of her serious gambling addiction.

Vehicle give-ups
Tramesha Lashon Fox worked in Houston as a high school chemistry teacher. She no longer wanted to make payments on her Chevy Malibu so she offered two of her failing students passing grades to torch her car for the insurance money. Authorities found out and she was quickly fired. She went on to serve 90 days in jail.

Fake tainted-food claims
Carla Patterson tried her best to tap into a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Virginia. She tried to get a $500,000 insurance settlement after discovering a mouse in her vegetable soup. The national chain investigated and found that the mouse had no soup in its lungs and had not been cooked. Patterson was then sentenced to a year in prison. Swindlers like Patterson will often target restaurants to make a quick profit in the belief that the restaurant won’t want the negative publicity. Chain restaurants like Cracker Barrel are smart enough to take the risk of fake tainted food claims. Furthermore, they have also tightened their food production procedures to combat false claims.