Credit: Bucks County District Attorney’s Office
Cynthia Clarey was a cancer to the insurance company she defrauded of nearly $135,000, according to prosecutors.
The 60-year-old Falls Township woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to felony insurance fraud, theft by deception, attempted theft by deception and five counts of identity theft, according to the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office.
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Clarey was arrested in September 2015 for allegedly defrauding her insurance company of just under $135,000. She claimed that both her and her husband had cancer and were undergoing pricey treatments. Investigators later confirmed Clarey and her husband were cancer free and had never suffered from devastating disease.
Clarey’s sentencing was deferred after Judge Wallace Bateman requested a mental health evaluation.
The district attorney’s office said prosecutor Gregg Shore requested Clarey be sentenced to state prison time, while defense attorney John Kerrigan sought a lighter sentence of probation.
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“I’m a terrible person for doing that,” Clarey told Bateman.
Over the course of a year, Clarey filed claims for 462 cancer-related treatments with a total cost of $503,213. The claims came along with fake documents from medical practices that supported her fraudulent claims.
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Various claims were paid out to Clarey until Allstate stopped in June 2014.
At that time, the insurance company requested medical records from the hospital to continue making payments. Allstate never received consent to obtain the records and heard no protest from Clarey when they stopped paying for her husband’s alleged treatments.
An insurance claims examiner investigated the filings with Middletown and Yardley medical practices that Clarey stated she was receiving treatment from.
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“Both medical providers indicated that the documents pertaining to their respective practices were not created by them, and that no such treatments occurred at their respective facilities,” according to court papers.
When the doctors’ offices reviewed claims submitted to Allstate from Clarey, they confirmed they did not issue the documents. The documents were reported to have contained misspellings, wrong addresses and incorrect phone numbers.
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“Your Affiants reviewed the submissions received by Allstate from Cynthia Clarey regarding the alleged treatments received by both she and her husband. The words ‘receipts’ and ‘adjustments’ are misspelled on several documents as ‘receits’ and ‘adjustents,’ respectively. Other documents were found to have P.O. boxes, zip codes and telephone numbers assigned to medical providers that were incorrect,” detectives wrote in an affidavit of probable cause.
During a summer 2015 interview with county detectives Timothy Perkins and Eric Landamia, Clarey admitted to “creating fraudulent invoices and claims documents on her home computer and typewriter, and then faxing them from her employer’s office,” a statement from the district attorney’s office said.
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Clarey reportedly said the motive behind the crime was to obtain money to pay for medical bills for her husband. Clarey’s husband, according to the district attorney’s office, is sick and unemployed.
An investigation was handled by the grant-funded Bucks County District Attorney’s Insurance Fraud Unit. The specialty unit looks into insurance fraud and works with the Pennsylvania State Insurance Commission.
