Man pleads not guilty to using fake cat for faulty insurance claim
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TACOMA, Wash. -- A man accused of trying to scam his insurance company over a dead-cat claim pleaded not guilty to a theft charge on Wednesday.
Yevgeniy Samsonov is accused of trying to bilk his insurance company out of $20,000 by claiming his cat died in a car accident.
Prosecutors say Samsonov, 29, was involved in a minor traffic accident in 2009, and the other driver's insurer paid some $3,500 to cover chiropractic treatment. More than two years later, Samsonov claimed that his cat, Tom, had been killed in the accident and sought $20,000 in compensation.
Samsonov submitted photos of a cat, but an insurance representative found that the pictures had come from the Internet -- one of the photos was among the top image results for a Google search of the terms "white cat."
"Clearly he didn't think through how easy it would be to simply check the Internet and have the first two cats pop up that happen to be the photos that he sent in," said Assistant Attorney General Melanie Tratnik.
The attorney general's office says when first confronted with the evidence against him, Samsonov wasn't very cooperative.
"He made multiple denials and stories changed multiple times in terms of what actually happened," Tratnik said.
The trial over the alleged fake cat scam is scheduled to start in September. If convicted, Samsonov could get a year behind bars.
Yevgeniy Samsonov is accused of trying to bilk his insurance company out of $20,000 by claiming his cat died in a car accident.
Prosecutors say Samsonov, 29, was involved in a minor traffic accident in 2009, and the other driver's insurer paid some $3,500 to cover chiropractic treatment. More than two years later, Samsonov claimed that his cat, Tom, had been killed in the accident and sought $20,000 in compensation.
Samsonov submitted photos of a cat, but an insurance representative found that the pictures had come from the Internet -- one of the photos was among the top image results for a Google search of the terms "white cat."
"Clearly he didn't think through how easy it would be to simply check the Internet and have the first two cats pop up that happen to be the photos that he sent in," said Assistant Attorney General Melanie Tratnik.
The attorney general's office says when first confronted with the evidence against him, Samsonov wasn't very cooperative.
"He made multiple denials and stories changed multiple times in terms of what actually happened," Tratnik said.
The trial over the alleged fake cat scam is scheduled to start in September. If convicted, Samsonov could get a year behind bars.
 These images, provided by the Washington state Office of the Insurance Commissioner, show a photo of a cat that was purportedly killed in a traffic accident sent to PEMCO insurance (left) and an identical photo found on the Internet (right). |
This is not Mr. Samsanov's first attempt at fraud. Â He used to work for the company I worked for. Â I spent 100's of hours dealing with his repeated attempts to bilk money from any source possible. Â Defending the company against his schemes became a full time job. Â He filed a bogus L&I claim, a lawsuit for discrimination, asked other employees to help him stage a car accident and offered to split the proceeds, attempted to talk people into taking checks drawn on his grandfather's account (from a foreign bank) and giving him cash, filed a claim against an airline for lost baggage containing a very expensive and totally imaginary Rolex. Fraud is Mr. Samsanov's chosen profession. Â
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My first run-in with him came when he came into my office screaming repeatedly that I had "stolen" his money. Â I checked the payroll records from his direct deposit the previous day and the pay was calculated correctly and also issued correctly by our bank. Â I made him call his bank and we listened to the recording of the transactions on his account. Â There were a dozen or more bounced checks fees which had "stolen" his money and the record showed a deposit of exactly what he was supposed to receive as pay. Â No apology, of course. Â
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Mr. Samsanov was also the cause of a lot of turmoil on the factory floor.  He liked to instigate trouble and he was good at it. This man is bad news.  The bottom line: watch your wallet and your back around him!Â