Woman faked husband’s death to collect $2M, charges say
January 14, 2015 by Tad Vezner, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.
Jan. 14–A couple of years after Igor Vorotinov’s wife told his insurer that he died in Moldova, the FBI grew suspicious.
The purported death of Igor in October 2011 netted his widow, Irina Vorotinov, reportedly of Minneapolis, Maple Grove and Plymouth, more than $2 million from a life insurance claim.
That claim — which included a badly putrefied body, found lying on the side of a rural Moldovan village road — was false, prosecutors now say.
Irina Vorotinov, 50, and her son, Alkon Vorotinov, 25, were charged Tuesday in federal court in St. Paul — the purported widow with mail fraud, and her son with having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony and concealing a crime.
According to a criminal complaint, Mutual of Omaha, the insurance company that paid Vorotinov’s claim, hired a private firm to investigate the 2011 death.
That firm interviewed the Moldovan police officer who found the supposed body of Igor Vorotinov.
The officer received an anonymous 902 call (the equivalent of 911 in the United States), saying a dead body was at the entrance of Cojusna village in Moldova, an eastern European country between Romania and Ukraine.
The officer said he found the body on the side of the road between two bushes and determined there were no signs of violence; he then called his son to help him take it to a morgue in Straseni.
A passport and hotel cards belonging to Igor Vorotinov were found with the body.
Neither the police officer nor the morgue took pictures of the body, because neither authority “had access to a camera,” the complaint stated.
Irina Vorotinov traveled to Moldova from the Twin Cities, identified the body as her husband and ordered it cremated. She then took the ashes back home to Minnesota.
In March 2012, she received a check from Mutual of Omaha for $2,048,414.09 in life insurance proceeds.
More than a year later, in June 2013, the FBI received a tip from an anonymous source in Moldova that Igor Vorotinov was not in his widow’s urn.
Investigators determined that Irina and Alkon Vorotinov had transferred $1.5 million of the insurance claim to accounts in Switzerland and Moldova in the same month the funds were awarded to them.
In November 2013, customs officials stopped Alkon Vorotinov and his fiancee at the airport in Detroit, en route from Moldova to Minneapolis, and took their laptops.
The following month, using warrants — the basis of which was not detailed in the compliant — to search both computers, investigators discovered digital photographs of Igor taken in spring 2013, “in which Igor is very much alive.”
An FBI investigator added in the complaint: “I have personal knowledge that the person depicted in the photographs is Igor because I met Igor in connection with a prior investigation of Irina and the person depicted in both photographs is Igor.”
The images also matched Igor Vorotinov’s driver’s license photo and were identified by “a cooperating individual who has known Igor for many years,” the complaint stated.
Metadata from the digital photos showed they were taken in 2013, and the camera used to take them was not available for purchase until June 2012, more than nine months after Igor purportedly died.
Tad Vezner can be reached at 651-228-5461 or follow him on Twitter @SPnoir.
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