On April 26, 2024, a tractor trailer hit a parked car on Staten Island. Afterward, according to New York investigators, someone said he had been sitting in it.
Esgar D. Zavala Espinoza, 29, claimed he was inside the parked vehicle when the truck struck it and that he was hurt, according to a case summary released by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office on Oct. 20. Investigators determined he was not in the vehicle. By then, the state says, the insurer’s losses on his treatment had reached $41,540.24. He is charged with third-degree insurance fraud, third-degree grand larceny and first-degree falsifying business records.
His case is one of 13 on that list. Together they account for 16 arrests and 31 charges, 29 of them felonies, from a joint investigation by the New York State Police and the Department of Financial Services. The state puts the attempted fraudulent claims at nearly $500,000, spread across New York City and Suffolk, Onondaga, Monroe and Erie counties.
Everything below comes from the state’s announcement and case list. These are allegations. Nobody named has been convicted in these cases, and the state says the investigations are ongoing.
Somebody had video
The case the governor’s office led with happened in Brooklyn on Dec. 2, 2025. According to the case list, video shows one car turning into another vehicle that was stopped at a stop sign. The driver of the turning car then claimed the stopped driver had run the stop sign, and filed more than $16,000 in medical claims.
DuSean Barnett, 28, of Brooklyn, is charged with second-degree staging a motor vehicle accident, third-degree insurance fraud, third-degree criminal mischief and first-degree falsifying business records. The state has not released the video or said who recorded it.
Video turns up twice more on the list. In Queens, the state says Derek Webster, 25, filed a police report saying an Amazon truck had struck him, and that video showed he staged it. The insurer had already paid more than $18,000 in no-fault benefits. On the Cross Bronx Expressway, the state says the occupants of a car deliberately hit the side of a tractor trailer and then claimed the trailer hit them. Video, according to the list, showed who hit whom.
Count the vehicles cast as the at-fault party across the list: two tractor trailers, an Amazon truck and, in a separate Bronx case where a 61-year-old woman claimed she was struck by a bus, a bus. That claim, for $4,027.36 in medical bills, was denied and nothing was paid.
The calendar problem
Two cases did not need video. They needed dates.
In Suffolk County, Jonathan Canarick, 38, reported that his motorcycle, valued at about $50,000, was stolen on Jan. 16, 2026. Investigators say it was actually stolen on Jan. 6, when it was uninsured. He is charged with third-degree insurance fraud and third-degree attempted grand larceny.
In Syracuse, Susan Guralny, 40, filed a claim on Feb. 13, 2026, saying the front-end damage on her 2019 Ford F-150 came from hitting a deer. Progressive estimated the repair at $4,084.51. Investigators found the damage was already there on or before Feb. 5, when the truck had no active policy. She is charged with fourth-degree insurance fraud.
In neither case does the state’s summary dispute that something happened to the vehicle. It disputes when.
The biggest bills mostly went unpaid
The largest dollar figures on the list come from three Bronx crashes the state describes as staged with multiple participants who then got treatment for claimed injuries.
- Nov. 12, 2025: $154,048.05 in medical bills submitted. The claim was denied and nothing was paid. Miguel Cruz Pena, 38, Mario Escolastico De Jesus, 48, and Silvestre Scolastico Cotorreal, 59, each face second-degree insurance fraud, second-degree attempted grand larceny and first-degree falsifying business records.
- Oct. 11, 2025: A combined $115,919.29 loss to the insurer. One suspect, Ramon A. Guzman Colon, 58, was arrested; his charges include second-degree staging a motor vehicle accident and second-degree reckless endangerment. A Ramon Guzman Colon is also named in the Cross Bronx tractor-trailer case. The list does not say whether it is the same person.
- March 18, 2026: $70,744.41 in medical bills submitted, and the insurer paid nothing. Nelson Colon Hernandez, 39, and Maria Colon, 45, face second-degree insurance fraud, second-degree attempted grand larceny and first-degree falsifying business records.
Where money did go out, the amounts were smaller. In Suffolk County, the state says Neris Almendarez, 41, claimed to have been a passenger in a collision; $12,623.50 in medical bills were submitted and the insurer paid $11,334.72. The rest of the list includes an Erie County man accused of giving false information on a claim, and a 23-year-old Rochester woman accused of filing a claim under someone else’s policy using that person’s identity.
The man in the other car
Staging a crash is its own felony in New York. The second-degree statute covers a person who, to further a fraudulent insurance act, operates a motor vehicle and intentionally causes a collision. The wording centers on whoever is driving.
That wording gap shows up in a case the state closed out in August. Two Brooklyn men were sentenced for staging three crashes on New York City highways in 2024, according to DFS and the Queens District Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors said one man drove, braking suddenly or cutting in so the car behind would hit him, and once reversing into a car that had stopped in time. After each crash, they said, he slid into the front passenger seat and got out on that side while passengers covered the rear window with a tarp or plastic bag. Then he left in a getaway car. The other man followed in a separate vehicle, directed when and how to crash, and sent the remaining occupants to specific medical clinics.
Two of the drivers they targeted had dashcams. One captured the driver getting out of the car.
The driver pleaded guilty to second-degree staging a motor vehicle accident, fourth-degree insurance fraud and conspiracy, and got two years in prison. The man directing from the other car pleaded guilty to third-degree insurance fraud and conspiracy, and got one to three years.
The budget Hochul signed this year changes that math. According to the governor’s May announcement, prosecutors can now seek criminal penalties against people who organize staged accidents, not only the drivers. The same package limits damages for people breaking the law at the time of a crash, such as uninsured or drunk drivers, tightens the definition of “serious injury” for pain-and-suffering claims, and bars drivers found mostly at fault from suing for large awards.
Why every driver pays
Insurers reported 43,811 suspected motor vehicle insurance fraud incidents to DFS in 2025, an 80% increase over five years, according to the state. Most involved suspected no-fault fraud, the system that pays medical bills regardless of who caused the crash. The state cites estimates that staged crashes and related fraud add up to $300 a year to premiums, in a state where the average driver already pays slightly more than $4,000 a year, nearly $1,500 above the national average.
Picture the Brooklyn case from the other seat: you’re stopped at a stop sign, and the driver who hit you says you ran it. What answered that accusation, according to the state, was video. In the August case, it was dashcams in the cars of drivers the scheme had picked as targets.
If you think a crash you were in was staged, the state asks drivers to call the DFS Insurance Fraud Hotline at 888-372-8369 or report it online. Crash-related schemes are not unique to New York, either. In Colorado, prosecutors recently indicted two Denver tow company owners accused of asking crash victims for up to $8,000.
The insurers on this list denied the largest claims outright. In several of the others, what undid the story, according to the state, was a recording.
Do you run a dashcam, and has it ever settled an argument about who hit whom?
Top photo: File photo of a New York State Police patrol car in Manhattan, not involved in these cases. Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0