Impersonating a police officer is one thing but a Florida man couldn’t stop there as he also attempted to defraud insurance companies with his funeral escort business.
Jeremy Dewitte previously impersonated a police officer and has now moved on to his latest scam, getting charged with a slew of insurance fraud charges along the way. Dewitte closed his Metro State motorcycle business a year ago and is now facing nearly a dozen charges related to his alleged efforts to use his funeral escort business to defraud insurance companies.
Dewitte started the scheme by registering some of his Metro State vehicles with multiple insurance companies under his wife’s name and listed them as personal vehicles, in an attempt to evade higher charges put on cars used for business purposes. Dewitte’s actions have been described as a common insurance fraud scheme.
In addition to the charges related to Dewitte’s company car registrations, investigators also found that the man was defrauding companies with inflated damage estimates from crash scenes. In one instance, Dewitte submitted photos and invoices to an insurance company for a crash that happened in Orlando in May 2020 but it was revealed that those pictures had been taken up to three years prior to the actual incident.
For that crash, investigators said Dewitte received $9,490 from the insurance company, which included a $2,000 check for injury claims that he made even though he wasn’t the driver of the car. Five months later, Dewitte pulled the same stunt with a different insurance company, submitting some of the exact same photos and invoices that he used for the May crash.
If Dewitte is found guilty of these charges, he may face significant fines and possible prison time.