7 northern California men indicted in multimillion dollar insurance fraud scheme

FRESNO, Calif. — Seven northern California men have been indicted on federal charges for allegedly staging car crashes and filing false insurance claims in a scheme that defrauded insurance companies out of more than $1.2 million.

The seven defendants, who are charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and mail fraud, were identified as part of a joint probe by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the California Department of Insurance, Fraud Division. The men are named in a sealed indictment handed down Aug. 27, which was unsealed Tuesday. They are - Juan Ortiz Rivas, 38, of Ceres; Oscar Diaz Landa, 45, of San Jose; Victor Hugo Soriano-Villafan, 25, of Modesto; Liobigildo Vargas, 45, of Turlock; Juan Marquez Cadenas, 29, of Patterson; Cristopher Santiago Sanchez-Becerra, 31, of Stockton; and, Alfonso Apu, 47, of Modesto.

Landa, Sanchez-Becerra, and Apu were arrested Tuesday morning at their residences. Vargas was taken into custody at his business, Vargas Auto Body in Turlock. Soriano-Villafan was arrested last week in Las Vegas and arraigned in U.S. District Court in Fresno.

According to court documents, from October 2011 until August 2014, the defendants conspired to stage dozens of car accidents and submit false claims seeking compensation for the damage caused by the staged accidents. In each staged accident, the defendants damaged two or three vehicles and caused about $5,000 to $10,000 of damage to each vehicle. After each staged collision, all parties involved submitted a similar cover story to an insurer that concealed the true cause of the accident and commonly used aliases, false identities, and false addresses. The defendants usually obtained many different vehicles and used false identities to both register the vehicles with the Department of Motor Vehicles and obtain insurance policies.

The indictment further alleges the defendants were able to repeat the scheme in dozens of crashes by recruiting other individuals in the staged collisions. These individuals would allow their vehicles to be damaged in a staged collision and submit their own claims after receiving instructions from the defendants about the cover story to use. In many instances, false claims were submitted to the recruited individual’s insurance company. Commonly, the defendants would also offer to repair the recruited individual’s vehicle at one of their automobile repair shops, usually with less-than-complete repair work, for a fee less than the payment from an insurance company on the damaged vehicle.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Patrick R. Delahunty and Henry Z. Carbajal III are prosecuting the case.

If convicted, each defendant faces a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count of the indictment.