Women caught collection life insurance proceeds on made-up individuals

Two California women have recently been caught running a scam that allegedly worked like this:

Faye Shilling and Jean Crump would create a fictional person and then take out life insurance on his or her life.  They would then wait for the policy to mature.

Once the policy was mature, they would claim that the insured had died and create fake death certificates and other supporting documents.  They would then buy a burial plot and conduct a fake funeral complete with a casket filled with materials to approximate the weight of a corpse.

After the burial, they would have body exhumed and conduct a cremation.  Later, they “wised up” and did the cremation without the sham burial.

By defrauding insurance companies and assignment companies, this scam may have netted them over $1 million.

A notary and a cemetery owner have already pled guilty to assisting in this scheme.

See Larry Altman, Woman accused in burial plot, dailybreeze.com, April 8, 2009.