SWEETWATER, Fla. – A Sweetwater man and two others billed an auto insurance company more than $91,000 for injuries sustained in a hit-and-run crash in the summer of 2022. But according to authorities, there was a problem: they weren’t hurt, because there was no crash.
State insurance fraud investigators arrested Lazaro Yosvel Pacheco, 33, on Friday morning.
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Two accused co-conspirators, Rosemery Nunez, 30, and Jose Froilan Lopez Ramirez, 50, were listed as being “at large” in Pacheco’s arrest report.
Investigators said Pacheco claimed that he and his friends, Nunez and Lopez Ramirez, were attending an activity on July 27 and asked Nunez to drive them back.
The report states that he claimed someone then rear-ended Nunez’s car on the way to his home, but couldn’t recall what Nunez was driving or what kind of vehicle the supposed other driver was driving.
He said Nunez dropped him off at home after making a police report, according to investigators.
But authorities said no one ever filed a report and Nunez’s story to a United Automobile Insurance Company investigator didn’t match Pacheco’s.
The arrest report states that Nunez told the insurance company that she picked up Pacheco, a friend of Lopez Ramirez, at a gas station and said she never called police after the phantom wreck. She did file an insurance claim, however.
The trio made claims through a number of clinics in Miami-Dade County, totaling $91,250, for therapy that never happened, the report states. UAIC never paid out the claims, however.
It’s not clear whether authorities suspect the clinics or their staffers of being in on the ill-fated scheme.
Pacheco was being held in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on a $30,000 bond Friday. He faced three charges each of insurance fraud and grand theft.