The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas | Hacker News Reader

The wildest insurance fraud scheme in Texas

texasmonthly.com

231 pointsdiaphanous112 comments

What a fascinating character & interesting read.

> he is taking college correspondence courses, “the path of least resistance” toward a business administration PhD. “I simply thought, if someone is going to call me a con man or [say] ‘you’re an asshole,’ well—it will be doctor asshole,” he said.

He may be in prison, but at least he's not lost his sense of humor. Completely in character based on the rest of the piece!

I gotta say, ditching a small airplane 30 miles off shore in the Gulf of Mexico is a hell of a risky way to collect $50,000 in an insurance payout. You've got a lot of faith in your ability to make a "water landing", much less that someone comes out and gets you before something goes wrong.

Sounds like a hell of a lot more fun than setting a house on fire.

yeah, the article seems to paint a pretty clear picture of a guy who figured out how he could crash-land a plane and get paid for the experience. he probably would have done it for $5.

Could you not call in a mayday?

You're still impacting the water at around 80 mph in a light aluminum craft not designed for such a situation. There's a lot of room for something to go wrong resulting in a fatality.

Same thought occurred to me. I would have thought proving that was intention would be pretty hard considering the personal risk involved.

Ah but he claims he actually did that to sell waterproof iPad cases, according to the end of the article. Makes sense to me.

Perhaps he just had someone let them jump off of a boat. They changed the serial number and resold the plane separately. Maybe the friend who dumped them off the boat was also the one who "rescued" them after a few hours. Who knows?

Given how long it took to catch him, after years of outrageous purchases and shady business dealings, it makes me wonder if frauds are much more common than conventional wisdom would lead one to believe.

What is the conventional wisdom? Because frauds are extremely common.

Well MLM scams are alive and well today and have been coming out of Utah for the last 20 years so I'd say fraud is pretty common. Check Craigslist for some fun frauds and scams, they're right out in the open. Social media are open markets for fraud too

How tough is it to take down such an operation? Bill Ackman bet and lost $1B trying:

https://dealbreaker.com/2020/05/herbalife-fined-for-china-br...

My SO had an acquaintance try to convince her and her friends to join an airplane game scheme a week or two ago.

I read the google drive PDF that they use to convince people, and it's terrifying how effectively it would prey on desperate people. Also crazy: nobody in the scam checks that NOT ONE of the people in that document (who mostly have unusual names) has a meaningful presence on the internet.

What is an airplane game scheme?

Looks like a pyramid scheme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_game

I'd love to see the document on the Google drive, though! OP, can you share it somehow?

Couldn't find a more resilient/less sketchy way to rehost without breaking my half-hearted anonymization, so here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvMeetDz-uEhxolTAGBrwh2hugt...

Hope I'm not blowing anyone up (well, not really. Scammers can drown in their own sewage).

I dug around for what I could, but there are a distinct lack of identifying details. I don't think I've seen a marketing PDF in a long time that didn't contain a single link. Looks like most of their coordination is done through Telegram groups and Zoom presentations, without an actual internet footprint.

This is fascinating reading, thanks so much for sharing!

Smith, most common last name in the USA.

It's a straight up ponzi scheme.

Many frauds go unreported because they're too embarrassing to the business to be public.

Fraud is extremely common and the best way to avoid it is to get personal recommendations for anything important, like business contacts, lawyers, or accountants.

Over a decade ago, a friend of mine was under the legal age when he sold his collection of websites with the same theme for around $100m. I'm sure you've heard of at least one of the properties. Being underage, he didn't know how to protect himself, and he gave his lawyers power of attorney. They took almost the entire acquisition for themselves and left the USA.

That's fraud. Those guys are still out there. He contacted other lawyers and they basically said "it's been too long the money is gone and so are these criminals."

Wonder if you could get a judgement and get the domains back.

Wasn’t madoffs whole Rolodex of investors by word of mouth?

It’s hard for an accountant to use their incoming tax returns to payoff their existing tax returns.

Wow that's a crazy story that would benefit from the streisand effect to enact some justice on those scumbag lawyers. Any idea why your friend isn't trying to actively expose these individuals who screwed him over?

Well, at first he was worried that he'd be known as a sucker and wouldn't be able to raise money for another company. "I sold XYZ for $100m, now fund my new thing ABC." Sounds a lot better than the raw truth. Since then, he's started something that's doing well. Some pretty interesting investors, some market traction, but he's still no where near being worth $100m.

My feeling from a decade in large companies is that fraud is actually more common than non-fraud; for every real project I saw that was interesting, there were two or three that were nothing but tissue-thin propaganda.

So assuming the politics of every day life apply to the world at large, I can totally see fraud as completely rampant without batting an eye.

They say everything's bigger in Texas, I didn't know it extended to narcissistic personality disorder.

As a Texan, I can tell you that's exactly why that saying exists in the first place.

I'm only half joking...

https://www.aiadallas.org/v/columns-detail/Everything-Is-Big...

I'm from a neighboring state that provides hospitality to wealthy Texan tourists. It's sort of an odd dynamic. Want people to enjoy themselves and have fun, but also take the wind out of people's sails from time to time. It's probably easier to explain with an old joke.

A Texan is bragging about how big his ranch is. "It takes all day to drive around the edge of my ranch". The sly reply is "Yeah, my truck's like that too".

Generally good natured, but from time to time, one side or the other is a little too invested in the hype and it's not so funny.

> The venture escalated on a kiosk-buying trip to the Shenzhen International Toy and Education Fair, in China, where, T. R. claimed, he came up with an idea for a console for pirated video games called Power Player that would plug into a TV and allow users to play classics like Space Invaders and Galaga. He decided to focus on selling Power Player wholesale. It was a huge hit, T. R. said, until the FBI began arresting the biggest Power Player retail operators. Panicking, he abandoned his business and left the United States with $8,000 to travel in Europe.

I'm pretty sure I actually own one of these. For a while I collected some of these silly pirate consoles. If I recall this one correctly it had a N64 controller body for some reason.

I don't want to read a novel before being able to understand what this is about. At least the article could provide a quick glimpse at what the fraud scheme is.

I kept reading for 5-6 minutes and then lost interest.

The insurance frauds were not really wild, just run of the mill kind, insure for more than you paid for it, crash it and claim damages. The wild element was the guy pursuing them.

I'm not knowledgeable on the inner workings of insurance but if the company agrees to insure for $X, even if it's more than you paid, then isn't that legal? I assume the deliberate crashing is the illegal part?

Insurance companies are well aware of the geniuses constantly rediscovering that you can overinsure something you don't care about and then cash it in.[1]

They try to protect against that by requiring that you can only get policies on something you have an "insurable interest" [2] in (i.e. independent reason to value it and not want the insured event to happen to it).

They also try to closely calibrate payouts so that they're not significantly more than the market value of the loss (ideally, a bit less) and thus prevent the "moral hazard".

Yes, sometimes you can get ahead of them and get a policy paying $X where X is significantly greater than the actual value to you, and have an expected value (profit * probability - costs) greater than zero. But you will almost certainly have to commit insurance fraud to do so, by hitting one of many "tripwires" that the insurance contracts have: lacking insurable interest, misrepresenting market value, actively causing the incident yourself, etc. [3] Any of those would give them an out.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1494/

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/insurable-interest.asp

[3] My comment on a similar story where the same logic applies; in that case, the fraudster exploited the fact that they weren't charging enough to cover the probability of the event, and insured events she didn't have an interest in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528221

I would argue three. Anyone can get an interest in anything, can't they?

An interest in making money, you mean?

I had an insurance salesman tell me stories of how farmers/speculators insure crop against loss and how some people buy policies for the explicit expectation of profiting on bad weather years because the policies are quite inexpensive.

That's why I argue and can debate #3. I'm not an expect, I don't know how it works, this was a waaaaay ago (2015.)

So, you know, my personal anecdote changes perspective and that sort of mindthink.

Insurance isn't actually gambling and the legal frameworks they operate under are very different. They have common features mathematically, but they serve very different economic and commercial purposes.

I thought it odd that the insurance paid out a set value. I always thought it was “insurance pays value of what you lost” and that was determined after the loss.

So the fraud is really misrepresenting what you lost, not insuring it for a set value when you buy the policy.

Collector car insurance and airplane insurance is typically written on an "agreed value" basis, where the insurer agrees at policy issuance that the car/airplane is worth $X if declared a total loss. We had a collector car insured through Hagerty that was hit by a red-light runner. They were amazing to deal with and paid the agreed value (minus the value of the crashed chassis that we bought back from them) within just a few days and went after the at-fault driver's insurance without us having to hassle with anything.

Airplanes and collector cars do not have a readily available source of "comps" to determine value and in both cases, the cost to recreate a given condition is typically higher than the value of that car/airplane in the open market. I can have an airplane that is "worth" $250K to me, that I could only sell for $200K, but that would cost $300K or more to recreate exactly by starting with an available airplane and re-customizing the avionics and airframe mods exactly. In such a case, I can probably get a policy written for any agreed value as low as I want (at the risk that I'd get cut a check for that amount and have no airplane in the event of a loss) and pretty close to $300K.

There's too many articles like this these days. I don't mind reading longform, but I've mostly given up on the format because of this issue.

The fraud is simply not the point. It’s a piece about TR Wright and his pursuer Reed. The headline is simply not that fitting.

The final paragraphs have a good summary of what type of character it is about:

> If he hadn’t gotten caught when he did, his business only would have escalated toward riskier, more-dangerous illegal dealings. “I probably would have had a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] indictment […];

Texas Monthly has been doing this for a long time. I personally like saving them for when I have a little downtime as they are usually very well done.

Comments like these aren’t very useful at this point and only detract from the conversation in a manner akin to people reflexively complaining about website design issues.

Dang, I really liked the long story. Just don't read it if you don't?

You didn't like OPs comment, but you replied anyway. And you can't know if you like something before reading it. And it is a forum, where anyone can (reasonably) tell everyone what (s)he think.

yeah, but it's mildly useful for people know that OP's comment isn't representative of readers, whereas it's not important that people know OP didn't like something because it was longform.

Kid bought an old crappy yacht. Years later he's caught in serial insurance fraud transactions for boats and planes. The dollar ripoff values go from $40k to $100k's rapidly within a few years, and a few years later he's in jail.

Guy is in this line of 'work' because he is an adrenaline junkie. It brings certain side benefits-- dealing in obscure obsolete aircraft and parts gives him means of leisure and more than a little swagger, without the pain of asset depreciation. Convinces himself, a romantic interest, and not many others, that he's James Bond.

Once his 'business' got big enough, it attracted the right attention and has given the guy an opportunity to remake himself yet again, this time from jail.

Why didn't insurers keep track of his record of filing claims and charge increasingly high premiums after his super-early claims?

They do; check out the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange ("CLUE report"), for example.

But just like any other business, there's always another company willing to take a chance at a high-but-not-too-high premium, especially if you're flashy enough with their agent. If the previous losses looked "plausible" or "unlikely to happen again" or the insured "has the financials of a good risk" or whatever, the policy will get written.

tl;dr summary from 3 years ago.

https://www.flyingmag.com/young-entrepreneur-and-pilot-faces...

I don't understand this comment at all.

First of all, the first paragraph is about a suspicious plane fire - the plane literally burned in half sitting in a hangar. That should provide you some hint about what the fraud scheme is going to be. There's even an animated image of a plane on fire! Did you need the author to print "this is a story about insurance fraud" in big bold print at the top of the story?

Secondly, comments like this are really worthless on HN, it adds nothing to the discussion and as you point out, you didn't even read the article. Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

>I don't understand this comment at all. [...] Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

I understand where the op's reading frustration is coming from. For some urls that point to pdf files or racy content, we might put informal warning tags such as "[pdf]" or "[NSFW]". But there really isn't a meta tag such as "[human_interest_story]" to warn readers of this type of article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story

There's nothing wrong with human interest stories (and even long form texts of it) but it's tedious for many who aren't expecting it. (I.e. some global readers aren't familiar with TexasMonthly and its editorial focus on long-form human interest articles.)

One type of reader just wants the mechanics of the insurance fraud explained. Thus, the human names -- whoever they are -- are not important -- because they will be forgotten 5 seconds after finishing the article. If it's the "wildest" insurance fraud, what makes it more wild than other insurance scams? Unfortunately, many articles "trick" readers with a compelling title about some <situation> but the actual article is mostly about <person(s)>. Some readers care more about details of the insurance deception than the escapades of Mr. TR Wright.

Another example of this mis-alignment between some readers and the author is the "Why it's so hard to find dumbbells in the US (vox.com)" article that was on HN front page today. The actual article starts off with human-interest stuff by mentioning people like like Andrew, Logan, Fread, etc and goes on like that for many paragraphs. But the HN top-voted comment extracts the relevant explanation that actually answers the question put forth in the title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270770

> One type of reader just wants the mechanics of the insurance fraud explained.

Exactly me. And I was not familiar with TexasMonthly, despite having lived in the US (California) for the last 8 years. (I am originally from Europe)

Then go to Wikipedia and look up "insurance fraud".

I think it's an expectation mismatch. It's jarring to expect to read a concise, structured news article, and instead start reading "It was a dark and stormy night..." We don't just have news articles here, but we have no way of tagging links as [long reads].

For you, my comment is worthless. Perhaps it is not for other people.

The fact that I did not read the entire LONG article is precisely what made me comment on how lengthy the article is, without providing enough context to know how the fraud scheme was perpetrated.

The article fails to explain and make a case of why it is worthwhile to read this long an article. The article seems more interested in weaving a narrative than reporting the salient facets in a succinct form.

> The article seems more interested in weaving a narrative than reporting the salient facets in a succinct form.

Yes, that is what the article was intending to do.

> Why even both writing a waste of a comment?

Because now the top reply of his comment is a summary of the article. So, not that useless of a comment

Apparently, HN is this user's version of book club. Rather than discussing the merits of the article, they'd rather discuss the style of the prose.

It's Texas Monthly. Whatever it's about, it'll be a well-written true story about outlandish characters that's worth your time.

A 6 hundred word article is blown up to 6 thousand words to fill more pages and sell more ads. It's not for the benefit of the reader.

Texas Monthly has a long, storied history as a well-regarded print magazine. A content farm it is not.

>A content farm it is not.

My overloaded uBlock says otherwise...

There were exactly 0 ads in that piece (unless you consider the 1 pitch to subscribe to that same magazine an ad).

I count 7: 4 third-party ad spots on desktop, and 3 subscription pitches (in-house ads) in the article copy.

Did you have an adblocker on? It definitely has ads -- I see a few within and a Frost ad to the side. uBlock reports 13 things blocked ... and updates.

How sad to have such a short attention span in a world full of intrigue.

I grew up reading a lot of long novels as a kid and rather enjoy long-form articles as well since there’s an opportunity to gain a richer perspective of the story. Texas Monthly has been around for half a century and their long-form articles are a welcome respite from short blips of journalistic writing that barely do justice to an interesting story to cater to short attention spans. I’m not saying this is the best article ever, but as an example of one I appreciated a lot, they once covered the twists and turns a Collin Street Bakery accountant took to steal vast sums from the company over many years so he and his wife could enjoy being part of the high society of the prominent small town. You might not care about that topic but my relatives have ordered this famous bakery’s fruitcakes for generations so it was a particularly intriguing story to me, and I know Texas Monthly was not trying to win someone like you over with clickbait. I’ve seen their hefty magazines on coffee tables for decades and I associate them with thoughtful writing. The story I mentioned is “Just Desserts”.

https://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/just-desserts/

No joke. 4 out of 5 times I open a news article on HN it is some kind of novella I have no interest in.

In our age of short time spans and competition for attention you would think news magazines would be concise and to the point, I would even say, lapidary. But for some reason they became an outlet for graphomania?

> In our age of short time spans and competition for attention you would think news magazines would be concise and to the point,

There are terse news outlets, but news magazines whole reason for existence, from the beginning, is providing deeper, more complete coverage of fewer stories than “short-deadline, break-it-first” media like TV and newspapers.

More flowery, yes. Deeper and more complete? I didn't notice that.

Sooooooo much whining and complaining about the length of the article in this comment thread. You realize you paid absolutely nothing to read it right? That the author is under no obligation to you to provide a "tldr;" for the people who think they're so busy they can't take 15 minutes to read a well-crafted and interesting story about a hustler and the guy trying to catch him.

Seriously, if your attention span is too short to read a medium-length article then you should really self-reflect about what's going on in your life.

I'm not sure why this appears to be a personal attack thing for you. I totally agree with the other commenter on this, 99% of the time when I see an article that is super long and takes a long time to get to the point I'll just click off. The fact is that it just doesn't matter or affect me enough to invest more than a minute or two reading it. In written form I prefer just getting the facts, not a short story. For longer stuff I prefer listening so I can go on a walk or do other things while taking in the (not really useful to me, but interesting) information, like a podcast format.

You may prefer the opposite, and thats OK too. It doesn't necessarily mean there is anything to significant reflect on in either of our lives. Or that one of us has the 'wrong' preference.

Have you considered reddit? Or possibly 9gag?

Reddit is just a link aggregator and 9gag is just an entertainment site.

> you would think news magazines would be concise and to the point, I would even say, lapidary. But for some reason they became an outlet for graphomania?

Some people enjoy reading.

> I don't want to read a novel

I don't think you're the audience this article is intended for. The article is written intentionally to be like a novella -- it's for a magazine. News/journalism sites are much more "just the facts ma'am"-focused.

The most disturbing part of this story is how light his sentence was. I sat in a Harris County courtroom and saw a 30 year old woman with no priors plead guilty to check fraud (a few thousand dollars worth), and get a longer sentence.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/theft-carnegie-l...

$8 million, three years’ house arrest and 12 years’ probation :-/

Very interesting read!

This fellow reminds me of Barry Seal [0], recently dramatized in the movie "American Made."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Seal

Some things don't seem very plausible. Obviously he was successful, but I doubt it was on a scale he tells it. If you're smuggling helicopters from Marseille to Chad, you don't deal with 40k insurance scams. I also doubt the claim of 35 million total in insurance fraud. If his scams were in the 40-200k range as mentioned in the article, he would need to deal with hundreds of claims. IMHO he's a medium level Frank Abagnale catch me if you can type con artist, who also likes to exaggerate his success. He's also a bit too open telling his story for everyone to know.

I read the whole thing and also did not appreciate the writing. Mostly it's just cliches and fluff, and superficial in that it didn't really dig deeper other than taking the said things for granted.

My impression was (and TR claimed so as well), that he did those things for fun. he was an adrenaline junkie. It might mostly be lies, and you could be right, but reading this, doing crazy insurance scams just because he could seems 100% in character for the person depicted.

It was made clear near the beginning that the details may or may not have been exaggerated or embellished. It was purposefully written as so because that's a part of what's intriguing about the character, that his entire schtick requires believing and/or personifying the exaggerations, and in a way it becomes reality.

5 years seems like such a small penalty.

He was an international arms dealer and from the sounds of it selling weapons to countries that it was illegal to sell weapons to. Who knows what those weapons were used for.

But I think he wasn’t convicted for that? (Not sure why.)

I think its a common situation where you have to decide between crimes with long sentences, but hard to prove and smaller charges that are easier to prove.

From the article it didn’t seem like the arms dealing was illegal?

“and before you realize it, you’ve got a load of freshly overhauled attack helicopters getting snuck out of Marseille in the middle of the night going to Chad.”

Maybe not but if it's not illegal, why would they need to be snuck out? He might have just been adding more drama to a regular old arms deal

Note - an L-39 is not a MiG - it was designed in Czechoslovakia by Aero Vodochody. A small point, but these kind of large errors in articles I'm supposed to be taking seriosly drive me crazy.

There’s nothing about TFA that should be taken seriously. It’s pulp fiction. Just like TR himself. Not to say “whoosh”, but I’m pretty sure that’s the whole point of the piece?

Completely besides the point, but isn’t it unnecessary to use ”TFA” in this instance? Personally I’m not at all offended by strong language, but it just seems hostile for no reason.

To me 'TFA' means The Featured Article.

Is there an abbreviation for that which is as widely known as TFA which doesn't have a negative potential interpretation (The Fucking Article)?

'OP' refers to the user who posted, not the post itself. The word 'Post' is I guess an OK but not great alternative.

>To me 'TFA' means The Featured Article.

Fair enough, I wasn’t aware/didn’t think of that. My mind went straight to ”the fucking article”, which is why it appeared hostile to me.

"TFA" is definitely "the fucking article". C.f. "RTFM": "Read the fucking manual".

Surely that is an example of a small error, not a large one.

I would have to ask an expert but the article is careful to not actually make the error you're seeing. L-39 might have some spare parts interchangeable with a MiG. They only call the spare parts "MiG spare parts", then later call the Albatros a Czech plane.

Fascinating read. And perhaps more.

>“Yes, I had around $35 million in fraudulent insurance claims around the world,” he wrote me

...

>He was also ordered to forfeit his Learjet and to pay $988,554.83 in restitution to various insurance companies

And they say crime doesn't pay. :/

Presumably title is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Little_Whorehouse_in_...

Hey selling insurance in Texas is hard enough. A guy said "You're telling a guy, buy this and your wife can live in your house and drive your car with another guy after you're dead". Hard sell.

It's interesting that ATF would be investigating an insurance scam just because there was arson involved. You would expect for a more suitable agency, one with more experience with such things to take over.

Sounds like a good candidate for an American Greed episode.

Would make a good script for a Wolf of Wall Street type of movie

> Reed, a fit 29-year-old who was as careful with his clean-cut brown hair and clean-shaven face as he was with his deposition-ready phrasing

Is there a tl;dr that would allow me to skip the bulk of this creative writing essay?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtx/pr/texas-pilot-sentenced-w...

He got away easy! Great read, thanks.

Of course he did, he had money.

Losing his wife (and daughter?) seems like a pretty significant consequence.

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