Tampa Woman Netted in Crackdown of Staged Accidents

A Tampa woman has been one of the latest people arrested as the city cracks down on “crash for cash” scammers. Tina Marie Figueroa’s arrest was the result of a year-long investigation that involved staged accidents and insurance fraud.

 According to The Miami Herald, officials noted Monday that they have audio and video evidence of Figueroa admitting to her involvement in two crashes, with the purpose of collecting on the insurance payouts.

 According to arrest reports, she received $1,000 in insurance payments after complaining of back pain resulting from a December 2009 crash. In April 2010, officials say Figueroa paid a driver and passengers to stage a fake crash. She didn’t realize that undercover state fraud investigators were involved in her plan.

Arrests records state that Figueroa is an account manager for United Health Care. She was released on a $21,000 bond on Monday, after being placed in Hillsborough County Jail.

 Why is Tampa the new place for “crash for cash” schemes? As The St. Petersburg Times noted:

While investigators focused on South Florida, “fraud flourished in an environment when no one was watching,” says Ron Poindexter, regional operations director of the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

“The area was ripe, the economy bottomed out and crime sort of migrated up from South Florida and now is as well entrenched in Tampa and Orlando as in Miami,” Poindexter says.

The bureau, which investigates suspect claims for the insurance industry, used to have one agent in Tampa. It now has five, plus two intelligence analysts. They were joined this year by a squad from Florida’s Department of Financial Services.

Figueroa has been added to the long list of hundreds of people who have been arrested in Florida in the past three years, in what chief financial officer Jeff Atwater calls “an epidemic.” This case is like so many others that investigators are looking into for auto insurance fraud. Questionable claims in Florida, which ranks No. 1 nationally for staged traffic accidents, are estimated to have cost consumers nearly $1 billion.