The Chief Financial Officer of a Wilton-based insurance firm has been sentenced in a $33-million scheme to steal client healthcare funds and defraud multiple lenders. Erin Verespy was ordered to 66 months in prison.
United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams says the 50-year old Trumbull woman helped manage a sophisticated, widespread scheme to steal millions of dollars of client healthcare funds, including with false and inflated invoices.
Employee Benefit Solutions LLC represented an automobile dealership chain headquartered in Westchester County, with the company paying invoiced amounts, expecting that EBS would pay the claims to the healthcare providers. Authorities say a significant amount of purported checks listed on the EBS “check register” invoices were never actually deposited by the healthcare providers. The money was used by Verespy's co-conspirators to pay their home mortgage expenses, as well as a personal credit card account with expenses relating to boating, luxury cars, and golf.
Authorities say Verespy personally made over $1 million from her participation in the fraudulent scheme.
By mid-2017, as EBS buckled under mounting outstanding fiduciary obligations, Verespy and her co-conspirators began an elaborate effort to conceal and perpetuate the ongoing fraud. Verespy was also sentenced to 5 years of supervised release and ordered to pay $16,053,508.19 in restitution and forfeit $1,066,038.02.
