West Virginia Annuity News

Former Insurance Broker Sentenced For Fraud And Money Laundering

A Hanson man was sentenced yesterday in federal court for defrauding a number of individuals who believed that they were purchasing annuity policies from Transamerica and with defrauding a client of the Catholic Order of Foresters (“COF”).

United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, Warren T. Bamford, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New England, and Douglas A. Bricker, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation Boston Field Office, announced that JOSEPH P. GARVEY, age 43, of 113 Andrew Lane, Hanson, Massachusetts, was sentenced by U.S. District Chief Judge Mark L. Wolf to 71 months in prison, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. Restitution was also ordered in the amount of $493,748, which was less than the total amount of loss because GARVEY had returned $177,104 to some of the victims.

At an earlier plea hearing, the prosecutor told the Court that, had the case proceeded to trial, the evidence would have proven that GARVEY perpetrated two fraud schemes in which he obtained a total of approximately $670,852 from various people. In one scheme, GARVEY, a former independent producer for Transamerica and insurance agent for the Knights of Columbus (KOC), used two intermediaries to defraud several individuals into believing that they were purchasing annuity polices from Transamerica. Instead of obtaining valid annuity policies, GARVEY took checks that the individuals had made out to Transamerica and deposited them into a bank account that he controlled. GARVEY then used the victims’ monies for his and his wife’s personal benefit. In the second scheme, GARVEY pretended to be a former elderly client whom he had met through the KOC, in order to fraudulently withdraw funds from an annuity policy she had with the COF. Read more at boston.fbi.gov.

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	Did You Know?
	A variable annuity has two phases: an accumulation phase and a payout phase. During the accumulation phase, you make purchase payments, which you can allocate to a number of investment options. For example, you could designate 40% of your purchase payments to a bond fund, 40% to a U.S. stock fund, and 20% to an international stock fund. The money you have allocated to each mutual fund investment option will increase or decrease over time, depending on the fund's performance.