Moldova To Minnesota: Man Allegedly Faked Death For $2 Million Insurance Payout
Igor Vorotinov, 54, was arrested in Moldova on Nov. 14 and extradited to the U.S. on Saturday. He made his first appearance in court on Monday.
Sherburne County Jail
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Sherburne County Jail
In 2011, police in central Moldova responded to a call reporting a dead body.
They found a passport, hotel cards and contact phone numbers belonging to a Minnesota man named Igor Vorotinov.
Vorotinov’s ex-wife, Irina, was notified and traveled to the small Eastern European nation to identify the body. She returned to the U.S. with a death certificate and an urn of ashes.
The urn was then placed in a mausoleum at the Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis — the same city where, on Monday, Igor Vorotinov made his first appearance before United States Magistrate Judge Kate Menendez.
The 54-year-old has been implicated in a family scheme to cheat an insurance company out of a large sum of money by faking his death, according to a statement from the District of Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office released Tuesday.
U.S. Attorney Erica MacDonald announced that Vorotinov had been arrested in Moldova last week on a single charge of mail fraud. He was turned over to the FBI and extradited to the U.S. from Moldova on Saturday by the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs.
Vorotinov’s alleged con, which has already produced two guilty pleas from the accused’s ex-wife and their son, began to take shape over eight years ago, according to authorities.
In March 2010, just over a year after filing for divorce, Vorotinov took out a $2 million life insurance policy on himself from the Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company. He listed Irina Vorotinov as the primary beneficiary and in 2012, a year after identifying his her ex-husband’s body, she received a check for the entire amount.
According to court documents, “Between March 29, 2012 and January 2015, more than $1.5 million of the life insurance proceeds were transferred to accounts located in Switzerland and Moldova.”
In 2016, Irina was sentenced to 37 months in prison after pleading guilty to both mail fraud and engaging in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property. In the same year, the couple’s son, Alkon Vorotinov, was sentenced to jointly pay, along with his mother, $2,056,554 in restitution after pleading guilty to concealing a felony.
A majority of the policy’s payout was had been transferred to a U.S. bank account baring Alkon’s name. While the 28-year-old avoided jail time for his involvement, it was his 2013 slip-up that, in part, led to the unraveling of the family’s story.
According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, “A tipster in Moldova told an FBI agent in June 2013 that Igor Vorotinov had staged his death and was living in Ukraine under a new identity.”
Later that year, the son was returning to the U.S. from a trip to Moldova and was stopped in Detroit by Customs and Border Protection. Agents seized his computer, where they found images of his father taken in April and May 2013, almost two years after his supposed death.
In June 2015, authorities removed the urn from the Lakewood Cemetery mausoleum and determined that the ashes were not those of Igor Vorotinov. Also, early that year, Alkon admitted to federal authorities that his father was alive and had been using the assumed name of Nikolai Patoka, the Star Tribune reported.
As reported by the Star Tribune, the son’s defense attorney said his client was originally ignorant of the scheme. He was led by his mother — who, as noted by the prosecution in her case, staged “a widely attended sham funeral” — to believe his father was dead for more than a year.
“Can you imagine, your own mother, and she brings an urn back?” attorney Matthew Mankey said, according to the newspaper. “Then dad shows up [alive]. What kind of people are these?”
Igor Vorotinov, who is being held at Sherburne County Jail, is expected in court next week.
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How Insurers Are Profiting Off Patients With Sleep Apnea
NPR’s Audie Cornish speaks with ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen about an investigation detailing how health insurers pass the high costs for sleep apnea breathing machines onto patients.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Lots of people with a condition called sleep apnea use breathing machines at night. Machines help them sleep better, stop the snoring that annoys their partners and stay alert during the day. The machines and their accessories can cost several hundred dollars. A new ProPublica investigation details the lengths health insurers are going to pass those costs on to patients or avoid paying them altogether. ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen has written about this and joins us now. Welcome to the program.
MARSHALL ALLEN: Thank you.
CORNISH: How do these machines work?
ALLEN: Well, it’s called a CPAP machine, and CPAP stands for continuous positive airway pressure. And basically, a patient wears a mask, and the mask jets air through the nose or through the mouth to keep the airway open during the night. Now, the machines also gather data on the patient’s sleep habits. It will gather the number of hours that the patient slept. It will gather the number of sleep interruptions in some cases that the patient has. And patients assume that that data is just being gathered for their doctors, which it is because the doctors need to know this information so they can make sure the treatment is really effective.
But that data can also be beamed through a wireless modem to the supply company. And from there, it can be sent often to the insurance companies. And the insurance companies are gathering the data to determine whether or not the patient is using it enough so that the insurance company will pay for it.
CORNISH: And this happened to your own boss, I understand.
ALLEN: Yeah. So I was already working on this story when one of my editors, Eric Umansky, came to me across the newsroom, and he was really alarmed. And what had happened is he went to a doctor and got a new setting – a new air flow setting for his machine. And the company that supplies his device had sent him a modem to plug into the machine. And that way they could update his settings remotely, which he thought was a great convenience.
Well, he also needed a new mask, and they hadn’t sent a new mask, so he called the supply company a couple days later and said, hey, I need my new mask. And they said, oh, well, by the way, you haven’t been compliant with your machine. You know, last night, you only slept 2 1/2 hours. The night before, you only slept 3 1/2 hours. And that’s when he realized that the machine was actually spying on him and tracking his sleep habits and sleep patterns. And the irony is he wasn’t able to use the machine because he didn’t have the new mask and yet they hadn’t been sending the new mask because they said he wasn’t using the machine. So he was caught in this kind of crazy Catch-22.
CORNISH: At the same time, is this also illegal? I mean, is there any real legal barrier to sharing this data?
ALLEN: Absolutely not. This is legal. And when patients give their consent for treatment with a CPAP machine and their doctor prescribes it, they don’t necessarily realize it, but they’ve also given consent for the insurance company to get the information for purposes of reimbursement.
CORNISH: Marshall Allen, what are the implications for this going forward? Because sleep apnea is a pretty specific affliction, right? But there are insertable heart monitors. There are glucose meters, right? There are Fitbits. There are a lot of medical devices that are going to be sending data about. What should we be aware of going forward?
ALLEN: Well, so we did look at other devices that are common that people use, and we did find that in a lot of cases, you know, with the patient’s consent, the data is being sent to the insurance companies. And what patients need to be aware of is that that data is being used to build a profile for each patient, and that profile may actually end up rating you a higher risk. And down the road, it could lead to a patient paying higher rates for their health insurance. And on the other side of it, there are all kinds of hidden ways that insurance companies are passing the cost of care on to the patients. And so even patients who are insured, in some cases, they might be better off not using their insurance than they are using it.
CORNISH: ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen – his story is on NPR’s Shots blog. Thank you for speaking with us.
ALLEN: Thank you, Audie.
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Father Of Illinois High School Football Player Poses As Referee
A lawsuit filed by parents at the Simeon Career Academy says the man attended the game in a referee’s uniform and helped sway the outcome of the game. His son’s team, Nazareth Academy, won.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I’m Steve Inskeep. It’s high school football playoff season, and the parent of an Illinois player left nothing to chance. He allegedly attended a game in a referee’s uniform. He worked his way into the game standing on the sidelines talking with the real refs, and his son’s team, Nazareth Academy, came back to win. The Chicago Tribune says boosters of the losing team are suing, but the fake ref defended himself on Facebook saying I didn’t make one bad call. I made sure the best team won. It’s MORNING EDITION.
Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
