Insurance Fraud

Six people have been charged with participating in an auto insurance fraud ring that scammed companies out of nearly $1 million, authorities said Thursday. The ring was busted after a California Highway Patrol officer deciphered a numerical code in a ledger seized from a Sherman Oaks attorney's office, authorities said. That attorney, Hamid Taghizadeh, 46, was the suspected ringleader of the operation, according to authorities. Taghizadeh allegedly paid people to bring him potential litigants to sue auto insurance companies -- an illegal practice known as "capping," said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist.

The maker of the Lap-Band will no longer sell its product to clinics affiliated with the 1-800-GET-THIN marketing company - a blow to Southern California surgery centers that have built an empire implanting the weight-loss devices in people looking to shed pounds. Allergan Inc. said in a statement that it has "made the decision to presently discontinue the sale of the Lap-Band … to all entities affiliated with 1-800-GET-THIN. " The Irvine company's action Thursday comes amid state and federal investigations of surgery centers affiliated with 1-800-GET-THIN, which touts the Lap-Band procedure on Southland freeway billboards and on TV, radio and the Internet.

A former office administrator for a Woodland Hills law firm pleaded guilty Friday to mail fraud and agreed to cooperate with federal authorities investigating a group of Los Angeles-area lawyers suspected of defrauding insurance companies of millions of dollars in legal fees. Kathleen M. Monahan, 45, became the third target of the federal probe to agree to assist the government. She was accused of mailing an inflated bill from the office of attorney Alan Arnold to an insurance company in November, 1985.

The California Department of Insurance is investigating the business practices of Lap-Band surgery centers affiliated with the 1-800-GET-THIN advertising campaign, according to insurer Aetna Inc. The insurance giant said in a statement that it was cooperating with the department's law enforcement branch, which has the power to make arrests and pursue criminal charges, to "investigate alleged fraud against our members by the 1-800-GET-THIN …...

Motorists unable to afford payments on pricey cars and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles in this recession are turning to a time-tested financing solution: matches. Insurance cheats are torching their vehicles in remote deserts. They're pushing them off cliffs. They're sinking them in lakes or ditching them in Mexico in the hopes of getting their policies to pay off, fraud investigators say. Nationwide, suspicious vehicle fires or arson increased 27% in the first quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an industry-supported agency that investigates all types of insurance fraud.

A whistle-blower lawsuit by two former University of California employees alleges that the university's five medical centers--at UCLA, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and UC Davis--billed the government for millions of dollars in fraudulent insurance claims.

For a decade, California employers and their advocates in Sacramento complained about the high cost of workers' compensation insurance and condemned abuses of the system by employees, who they said fake claims, exaggerate medical conditions and collect fat disability benefits. But some data suggest that employers -- not workers -- are the bigger workers' compensation cheaters. And the state is stepping up enforcement against businesses suspected of ignoring the law and endangering workers.

The labyrinthine murder and insurance-fraud case of Dr. Richard Boggs went to the jury Wednesday, after an eleventh-hour admission by his lawyer that the Glendale physician is "unquestionably guilty" of conspiring to collect life insurance benefits by falsifying the victim's identification.

Two Los Angeles police officers were charged Monday with insurance fraud stemming from a case in which one of them allegedly had his car torched and the other helped cover up the crime, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office announced. Anthony Robert Villanueva, 24, allegedly arranged to have his 2001 Lexus sedan taken to the desert and set on fire in April. He then reported the car stolen and submitted a claim with his insurance company to be reimbursed, authorities alleged.

A 65-year-old doctor was convicted Thursday of performing unnecessary and dangerous surgeries on more than 160 people in a $154-million medical insurance scam that lured patients by promising them cash or low-cost cosmetic surgeries. Dr. Michael Chan of Cerritos, one of 19 defendants accused of fraudulently billing medical insurance companies, pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court to 40 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and insurance fraud. He faces up to 28 years in state prison.

Jessica Bleaman, 21, responded in 2009 to an ad from 1-800-GET-THIN, the outfit that has been touting weight-loss surgery incessantly in the Southland via broadcast commercials and freeway billboards. Her experience with the gastric-banding purveyors didn't turn out well, but her alleged medical problems were only part of it. For months after her surgery, she said, she suffered pain and vomiting, and in 2010 she underwent a second operation at a clinic affiliated with the billboard campaign.

A 65-year-old doctor was convicted Thursday of performing unnecessary and dangerous surgeries on more than 160 people in a $154-million medical insurance scam that lured patients by promising them cash or low-cost cosmetic surgeries. Dr. Michael Chan of Cerritos, one of 19 defendants accused of fraudulently billing medical insurance companies, pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court to 40 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and insurance fraud. He faces up to 28 years in state prison.

Several Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies have been entangled in fraud allegations in the last year, a spike that the department's watchdog says may be linked to overtime cuts pushing cash-strapped deputies to commit crimes. One deputy torched his own car for an insurance payout, another fabricated a burglary and a third enlisted a fellow cop to help him drive his car to Mexico, where he abandoned it and later claimed it was stolen. Two other deputies are facing federal charges in an alleged mortgage fraud scheme, according to the report provided to The Times on Monday by the Office of Independent Review.

Several Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies have been entangled in fraud allegations in the last year, a spike that the department's watchdog says may be linked to overtime cuts pushing cash-strapped deputies to commit crimes. One deputy torched his own car for an insurance payout, another fabricated a burglary and a third enlisted a fellow cop to help him drive his car to Mexico, where he abandoned it and later claimed it was stolen. Two other deputies are facing federal charges in an alleged mortgage fraud scheme, according to the report provided to The Times Monday by the Office of Independent Review.

Meet the newest crop of farm vehicles: Porsche Carrera, Mercedes SL550 and BMW Z4. One wouldn't expect to see such high-performance roadsters pulling tillers, hauling fertilizer or spraying pesticides between corn rows, but if you believe their owners, these expensive vehicles are working alongside the John Deeres and Caterpillars of the world. It turns out that some drivers of these cars are perpetrating an insurance fraud — claiming them as farm equipment to harvest hefty discounts on insurance premiums.

A Los Angeles Unified school police officer charged with faking his own shooting, triggering a massive manhunt and schools lockdown, pleaded not guilty Friday after a six-count grand jury indictment was unsealed. Jeffrey Stenroos, 30, answered to charges handed down Thursday in the indictment, including allegations that he planted evidence. The indictment supersedes existing charges and avoids the need for a preliminary hearing. The lockdown and manhunt in January cordoned off much of Woodland Hills and cost the city and schools more than $400,000.

Estimates of auto insurance fraud in Los Angeles County were sharply increased Thursday, with Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner saying he believes that half of the $4 billion paid by consumers in annual premiums may be going to pay fraudulent claims. Officials at the state Department of Insurance's fraud bureau did not fully support Reiner's estimates, but they acknowledged that "pockets of the county" would reach the 50% fraud level while the overall figure "might be a little lower than that."

A federal jury convicted Stockton farmer Gregory P. Torlai Jr. of deceiving the government by filing fraudulent insurance claims to try to collect $400,000 from a taxpayer-backed insurance program set up to help farmers survive when nature destroys crops. Torlai, 49, was found guilty in Sacramento on all 16 counts of making false statements in an scheme to trick three private insurance companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Federal Crop Insurance Corp., which runs the federal crop insurance program.

The federal investigator took the witness stand and described the crime scene: a sprawling field clogged with boulders, native grasses and knee-high sagebrush. The defendant, a California farmer, had said the site was a 200-acre wheat field. But the investigator found no tilled soil, no tractors, no plows. In fact, she testified, she found no wheat. The field was just a field ? and a prime example, federal prosecutors allege, of a wave of agricultural insurance scams sprouting across the nation.