The street address listed for the domain ASD2Day.com appears in Florida records as the address of a woman charged with patient brokering and solicitation in a major insurance-fraud sting.
Records show that a woman named Barbara Cruz was charged with four felony counts of insurance fraud in 2000. The name Barbara Cruz was listed as the name of the registered owner of the ASD2Day site, which now is offline.
The Florida Insurance Commission described the case as a complex probe that involved staged automobile accidents, false Personal Injury Protection (PIP) claims against insurance companies and “runners” hired by unscrupulous medical clinics to recruit people involved in accidents — real or staged — into the insurance scam.
Bill Nelson, Florida’s insurance commissioner when the sting was conducted, said the scheme was sucking wealth from Florida’s economy.
“Our investigators estimate that more than half of the auto insurance PIP claims in the Miami area are fraudulent,” Nelson said, in 2000. “So far, we’ve identified at least $10 million that these suspects alone allegedly bilked from insurers at the expense of consumers throughout Florida.”
Nelson, who served as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Columbia in 1986, previously was a member of the U.S. House and is now a U.S. Senator.
Barbara Cruz was among a group of 51 people in the Greater Miami area in south Florida to be charged after a year-long investigation by the Insurance Commission. Docket entries show a person by the same name with the same birth date was charged in a case slugged “ANIMAL/FIGHT/OWN/SEL” in 1989.
How the case involving animals was disposed is unclear. A docket entry is marked “NO ACTION” and the file location is marked “DESTROYED.” The insurance charges are marked “NOLLE PROS,” which suggests the case ultimately was dropped.
ASD2Day.com appeared online in August, taking a Pro-AdSurfDaily point of view. ASD was implicated by the U.S. Secret Service in a $100 million Ponzi and fraud scheme in August 2008.
Among the claims on the site was a puzzling assertion that U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer was on an Aug. 28, 2009 deadline “to determine if the US Attorney General’s case against ASD should move forward.â€
Collyer was on no such deadline.
See earlier story.