Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, who quickly showed his cards on wasteful and fraudulent spending at the local level, has now announced a crackdown inside his own and other state government departments, related to fraudulent insurance claims.
CFO Blaise Ingoglia said Monday that six people, three of them recent state agency workers, were arrested in connection with a scheme that involved $1.7 million in fraudulent damage claims paid by the state Division of Risk Management.
Details were few, and arrest records were not immediately available. Ingoglia said in a bulletin that one woman who worked at the Department of Financial Services led the operation and processed more than 220 suspicious property damage claims.The woman, who was a risk management specialist at DFS, recruited people she knew and filed false vehicle damage claims for them from 2021 to 2024, according to local news reports.
Investigators found that many of the claimants did not own a registered vehicle and others did not have drivers’ licenses, WCTV reported. In two dozen instances, registration information had been altered. Some of the falsified paperwork was found in the woman’s desk, the news site reported.
The alleged ringleader was charged with grand theft, money laundering, fraud, criminal use of personal identification, and more.
Two others were employees at the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which licenses businesses in the state.
More arrests are expected in coming weeks, the CFO’s office said in a statement. The DFS Criminal Investigations Division led the probe into the alleged fraud.
After almost a decade of litigation, investigations and deliberations, criminal fraud cases against reported billionaire and North Carolina insurance entrepreneur Greg Lindberg appear to finally be nearing an end. A sentencing hearing is expected in the next few months, followed by a federal judge’s decision on how much in restitution Lindberg owes—and to whom.
A special master, a bankruptcy-specialist attorney appointed by the federal court in North Carolina, last week recommended that Lindberg pay just over $1.6 billion in restitution to seven insurance companies and financial firms in North Carolina and Bermuda. Those are companies that Lindberg once controlled – and from which he was convicted of diverting funds for other enterprises and for personal gain in a scheme that reached across the continent and involved an attempt to bribe an insurance commissioner.
The largest share of restitution, $821 million, should go to Colorado Bankers Life Insurance Co., the largest of insurers that Lindberg founded, then skimmed millions from over several years.
The funds diversion, as detailed in Lindberg’s federal indictment, constituted “a massive insurance fraud conspiracy, the purposes of which ‘were to evade regulatory requirements meant to protect policyholders, conceal the true financial condition of [Defendant’s] insurance companies, and conceal [Defendant’s] improper use of insurance company funds for [Defendant’s] personal benefit,'” Special Master Joseph Grier III wrote in his April 3 report to the court.
