No license, no policy, no problem.....

A Milford woman and a Malden man were indicted on five and twelve counts of motor vehicle insurance fraud, respectively, on Friday March 12, 2010 by a Suffolk County Grand jury. Virgin Lima, a licensed insurance agent in Brighton, was also charged with two counts of accepting gifts to influence business affairs, five counts of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and five counts of larceny over $250. Wanderson Silva (fortunately not this man for arresting officers), a Somerville car salesman, was also charged with nine counts of stealing a driver's license, three counts of accepting gifts to influence business affairs, 12 counts of larceny over $250 and five counts of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud.

Investigators believe that Silva was the mastermind and devised the following game plan: He promised unlicensed customers insurance policies by using legitimate license information from previous customers to obtain Massachusetts commercial automobile policies for his unlicensed customers. He had an agent (Lima) in his pocket and perhaps assumed that a commercial policy would not be as easily linked back to the previous customer. An investigation was ordered in June 2009 at the direction of a tip to the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts.

One can only speculate as to what that tip was. I was unable to retrieve that information. I'd be willing to bet that a registry check to the license number brought back a name and address and after documents were sent to the "legitimate" customer's address (from the registry), he could have tipped off another agent working with Lima or a claims adjuster investigating a claim. There would also have to be someone with knowledge of a connection between Lima and Silva.

Instances in which a tip to the IFB leads to an arrest like this are commonplace in Massachusetts. If Lima and Silva conducted their business in California, then they would have lived happily ever after.

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Problems with original blog: could not find out about how IFB was notified of the case as mentioned previously, found CA story about unlicensed insurance but original query of "selling unlicensed drivers auto insurance" (without quotes in the query) could have been more effective as I found myself looking at Canadian stories of a similar topic and the hit I was interested in was almost on page two of the results.