Insurance Agents Charged in $100 Million Fraud Scheme (Forbes)

The Manhattan United States Attorney and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have charged three insurance agents with a $100 million fraud scheme involving stranger-owned life insurance or STOLI. In an indictment announced Feb. 16, federal authorities accuse three agents — Michael Binday, 48, the president and owner of a Scarsdale, N.Y. insurance agency; James Kevin Kergil, 57, an insurance agent based in Peekskill, N.Y.; and Mark Resnick, 56, an insurance agent based in Orlando, FL — of conspiring to defraud major insurance companies into issuing life insurance policies to straw buyers, when the true owners of the policies were third-party investors and financiers. According to the indictment, the agents recruited elderly clients of modest means to serve as straw buyers and apply for universal life insurance policies. In exchange, the agents would pay them when the policies were resold. All three agents have been arrested.