A south Florida woman who was once a licensed insurance producer has been sentenced to spend more than three years in prison and forfeit assets after she pleaded guilty to a leading role in a $6 million property insurance and tax fraud scheme.
Lisette Patricio, 64, of Davie, Florida, pleaded guilty in federal court in Miami last month, three years after she was indicted for diverting millions of dollars in premium payments on force-placed policies on homes around the state, court documents show. She and co-conspirators Darely Carballeira, Arturo Morales and Yarelis Felipe told a company that three insurers had canceled force-placed policies.
They then convinced the company to send more than $10 million for new policies. The conspirators kept $6.6 million of that, according to the indictment and felony information documents.
“The co-conspirators prepared false statement of diligent effort forms fraudulently claiming that three named insurance companies in the State of Florida had declined to issue an insurance policy for the properties with lender-placed insurance policies obtained through Company 1,” prosecutors said in court documents.
“It was a purpose of the conspiracy for the defendant and her co-conspirators to unlawfully enrich themselves by, among other things: (a) identifying residential properties with lender-placed insurance policies through Company 1; (b) falsely asserting to Company 1 that they had obtained insurance policies for those properties for specified policy amounts through Company 3; ( c) causing Company 1 to send checks from a JPMorgan Chase bank account to companies they controlled in order to pay the premiums on the Company 3 policies,” the information sheet reads.
Patricio in the 1990s was a licensed producer and adjuster, Florida Department of Financial Services records show. Court records show that Morales, who reportedly worked with two Florida insurance brokerages but had not been licensed since the 1990s, was considered to be the architect of the scheme, The Real Deal news site reported. He allegedly found homes with distressed mortgages and force-placed policies.
Morales and accomplices at one point convinced Assurant insurance company, that they had found a better premium on the properties, and Assurant refunded the premium payments to Morales’ brokerages, TRD explained.
Morales was sentenced to four years in prison and Carballeira to four years, the news site reported.
Topics Florida