An Iowa contractor has been charged with acting as a public adjuster without a license and insurance fraud.
Joseph Starr, 39, of Rockwell, was charged with two counts of acting as a public adjuster without a license and one count of insurance fraud.
The charges followed an investigation by the Iowa Insurance Division’s Fraud Bureau. Criminal complaints filed by the Iowa Insurance Division’s Fraud Burea
u allege Starr was an employee of Sibling Construction accused of engaging in multiple acts of unlicensed public adjusting.
Starr allegedly negotiated insurance claims on behalf of clients with both Farm Bureau Financial Services and Osage Insurance and submitted invoices for compensation for work that had not yet been completed.
Starr was arrested and booked at the Cerro Gordo County Jail on March 27.
Iowa law restricts a contractor completing the repairs from acting as a public adjuster on an insurance claim.
Farmers Insurance said in a lawsuit that a former agent in Oklahoma allegedly conspired to move
Farmers’ insureds to other insurance companies, including an agency where his wife works.
Farmers said Bradley McKinney broke his agent appointment agreement with Farmers when he allegedly sold insurance policies for other carriers out of his Farmers agency office.
Before McKinney parted ways with Farmers in 2025, he downloaded his entire book of bu
siness and shared the confidential information with producers at another
agency, according to Farmers.
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The lawsuit was filed on March 11 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma.
From 2010 to 2025, McKinney operated a Tulsa-based Farmers agency under the name McKinney Insurance & Financial Services. His wife, Tory McKinney, and pr
oducer Christopher Spicer worked for the agency until 2023, when they left to join existing Hometown Insurance Agency in Tulsa, according to the suit.
Late in 2023, Bradley McKinney began to divert Farmers’ insureds and insurance policies to Tory McKinney and Spicer at Hometown, the suit alleges. Policies in force at
Bradley McKinney’s Farmers agency began decreasing in 2023, continued to decrease in 2024, and
decreased at an even more significant rate in the first four-and-a-half months of 2025, Farmers said.
The suit alleges that on Feb. 18, 2025, Bradley McKinney downloaded the entire book of busines
s of his Farmers agency in Excel, and two days later he submitted a letter to Farmers that he was terminating his agent appointment agreement.
Farmers’ proprietary customer data is protected through a secured sign-in process requiring m
ulti-factor authentication, the carrier said in the suit. Farmers specifically designates the information in the secured platforms as trade secrets.
Farmers terminated its agent appointment agreement with Bradley McKinney on May 15, 202
5, two weeks before his planned departure. He later joined Hometown, according to the suit.
