State AG announces insurance fraud charges
ADAMS TWP — A couple is facing felony insurance fraud charges after an attempt to have a bathtub replaced. State Attorney General Josh Shapiro on Friday announced the prosecution of 60 fraud cases statewide. Two cases are in Butler County.
Cindy Yoder, 43, and her boyfriend, Dirk McKinney, 46, made a claim last November on their Allstate homeowner's insurance policy that stated Yoder's youngest child had turned on the water in a bathtub at a home McKinney owns on Regina Street, according to court documents.
McKinney claimed, with Yoder's support, that the tub overflowed, sunk, and damaged the surrounding wood floor and a powder room beneath the tub.
The couple claimed that they lived at the single-family home, and that a relative named “Goodman” sometimes lived in a bedroom upstairs but rarely paid rent.
When a remediation company came to assess the water damage, no such damage was found. Yoder, according to the documents, claimed that was because she had done such a good job of cleaning up the mess from the accidental overflow.
Thinking the company might be taking a bath on the claim, the Allstate claims representative contacted the company's fraud investigators.
Allstate investigators interviewed the couple on two occasions, and suspected that McKinney and Yoder were all wet.
Charging documents claim that a man with the name “Goodreau” had been renting the house from the couple, who lived with Yoder's mother near Akron.
A relative of McKinney's had replaced the home's cracked bathtub with a smaller tub that he placed on two-by-four boards to compensate for the space between the new ill-fitted tub and floor.
Goodreau had accidentally kicked out one of the boards, causing the tub to sink. It was then that McKinney and Yoder concocted the story that they had gone out to eat in Cranberry Township and left Yoder's children with a baby sitter, and returned to find the youngest child had turned on the spigot and flooded the bathtub, the documents said.Amy Adams of the Attorney General's Insurance Fraud Section interviewed the tenant, who produced a lease signed by himself, McKinney and Yoder a few months earlier.The tenant told Adams that the couple did not live there and informed her of the mishap with the boards supporting the tub.Adams also discovered that McKinney's insurance policy did not cover rental properties.At first, said the documents, the couple insisted their story was true. However, Adams produced an accident report from police in Ohio stating that McKinney had been involved in a car accident on the very night he said the couple went to dinner in Cranberry Township and suffered the subsequent water damage at the home on Regina Street.Their story down the drain, the couple confessed and each were charged with two counts of insurance fraud and one count of attempted theft by deception.The charges were filed by Adams of the Attorney General's Insurance Fraud Section on Oct. 23 at the office of District Judge Wayne Seibel in Evans City.
In another case, a phone call from a stretcher in the emergency room has resulted in felony charges for a Beaver County woman.Christina R. Hansen, 41, of Conway is charged with insurance fraud, theft by deception and attempted theft by deception after lying about the time of the vehicle accident that resulted in her trip to the hospital.Court documents say Hansen's auto insurance policy with Progressive Insurance had lapsed on Jan. 4 for non-payment of the premium. Hansen reinstated the policy online at 10:23 a.m. Jan. 12 and electronically signed a document known as the “statement of loss.”In the SOL, investigators said she verified that she had no accidents from the time her insurance lapsed on Jan. 4 to the time the policy was reinstated at 10:23 a.m. However, investigators discovered through 911 records that Hansen was involved in an accident in Sewickley, Allegheny County, at 10:16 a.m., several minutes before she reinstated her policy online from the emergency room at UPMC Passavant in Cranberry Township.Charging documents say Hansen was at fault in the accident, in which she rear-ended a work truck at an intersection where vehicles were waiting for a red light to change. The collision caused a chain reaction wreck involving the work truck and the two vehicles in front of it.Before the investigation was carried out by the state Attorney General Office's Western District, Progressive paid out a total of $11,715 for the four damaged vehicles.The charges against Hansen were filed on Sept. 12 before District Judge David Kovach in Cranberry Township.
