Fraud News: Fake Fall, Stolen Art Scheme, Comp Auto Claim Fraud

A 59-year-old Mississippi woman has been indicted on criminal charges, with prosecutors saying she lied when she reported falling at a Walmart store.

State Attorney General Jim Hood said Friday that Dianne Bullock of Jackson is charged with one count each of insurance and wire fraud.

The indictment charging Bullock says she filed a complaint with Walmart in 2015 saying she slipped and fell while shopping at a store in McComb. Authorities say surveillance video showed the fall never happened.

The Clarion-Ledger reports Bullock would face up to eight years in prison and $15,000 in fines if she was convicted of both counts. She turned herself in to the Pike County Sheriff’s Department. It was not immediately known if Bullock had an attorney representing her.

A Boston federal jury has indicted a West Virginia man on charges he tried to sell paintings he did not have access to and falsely claimed were stolen in the largest art heist in U.S. history.

Prosecutors allege that 47-year-old Todd Desper, of Beckley, West Virginia, solicited buyers on Craigslist for two paintings he claimed were among 13 stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

Authorities say they determined Desper had no access to the paintings and was engaged in a multimillion dollar fraud scheme targeting foreign art buyers.

The FBI has said two suspects who masqueraded as police officers to rob the museum of $500 million worth masterpieces are deceased.

Desper was indicted Thursday on wire fraud charges. His attorney couldn’t immediately be reached on Saturday.

Insurance Commissioner Jon Godfread recently announced the recent insurance fraud charge filed against Joshua Kadrmas, of Mandan. Kadrmas is scheduled for a first appearance in court on August 22 in Morton County.

The Department’s report stated that Kadrmas indicated to his insurance company that he hit a deer while on his motorcycle causing in excess of $11,000 worth of damage. An investigation conducted after Kadrmas’s claim was filed determined that the damage done to the motorcycle was not consistent with striking a deer but instead appeared to have been caused by a hammer and/or a sander disk.

On Wednesday, August 2, a judge in Kootenai County sentenced a Portland woman to jail, probation and ordered her to pay restitution.

Jennifer Cadwell pleaded guilty to Insurance Fraud in June after an investigation revealed she’d filed a false claim on her Safeco renter’s insurance policy. Cadwell was living in Kootenai County when she reported her home was burglarized and multiple personal items were stolen. Investigators discovered that she had pawned the personal items before the alleged burglary and prior to insuring the items with Safeco. Her insurance claim was denied.

Kootenai County District Judge Lansing L. Haynes sentenced Cadwell to 30 days in jail and ordered her to pay $1,967 in restitution to the Idaho Department of Insurance. The defendant received a withheld judgment and two years of supervised probation.

The case was prosecuted by Deputy Attorney General Jessica Cafferty of the Attorney General’s Special Prosecutions Unit.