The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office has announced felony charges against two insurance agents for stealing a total of more than $114,000.
Travis Wingrove of Dunbar, Penn., and Jeff Ingram of Allison Park, Penn., were each charged with insurance fraud, theft by deception and identity theft.
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“In these cases, clients trusted agents to handle their policies, and they betrayed that trust,” said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. “We’ll prosecute anyone who breaks the law by stealing from clients or submitting phony insurance policies for their own profit.”
Authorities say that between 2013 and 2015, Wingrove stole more than $26,000 from clients while working as a State Farm agent. Prosecutors say WIngrove used a variety of methods to siphon off clients’ cash, including stealing from life insurance policies, taking clients’ car insurance premiums but never depositing them, and, in one case, convincing a client to apply for a loan on his insurance policy and then stealing the proceeds for himself.
“In another scam, Wingrove processed a life insurance policy dividend for $2,000 – $1,800 more than what he policyholder was entitled to – then had the client send Wingrove the $1,800, which was never returned to State Farm,” the AG’s office said.
Ingram, meanwhile, submitted 252 phony Medicare supplement policy applications between March and October of 2016, receiving more than $88,000 in advance commissions that he hadn’t actually earned. Ingram submitted the applications using personal information he either invented or obtained from sources like the phone book.
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The scam was uncovered after the company to which he submitted the applications, Medico Insurance, found that several policies had been returned as undeliverable. The company also received at least one notice that a purported policy applicant had died. Other customers contacted Medico to say that they had never applied for a policy.
“These cases remind us that when you’re taken advantage of, it’s often by people we trust,” Shapiro said.
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