LAWRENCE — Police said Matilda Gabin didn't want her 1999 Honda Accord anymore, so she developed a devious plan to get rid of it last October.
She is accused of hounding her husband to make the car "disappear" so she could file a stolen car report and use the money from the insurance claim to buy a new Nissan Murano.
But investigators from the city's auto insurance fraud task force said her husband wanted no part of the scam as long as they were together. Shortly after the couple broke up, he learned she got somebody else to "steal" the car, police said.
Police said he worried that he might get in trouble for the staged theft and phony insurance claim, so he reported the matter to the insurance company and later to police.
Investigators of the fraud task force and Arbella Insurance Co. soon learned that reporting the Honda stolen wasn't the only thing Gabin was suspected of faking.
Authorities said that Gabin also committed identity theft and forgery, working under her sister's name for a company while continuing to collect unemployment checks.
Investigators said Gabin committed additional insurance fraud by using a phony address — a post office box in Methuen — instead of her Lawrence address. This enabled her to avoid paying insurance premiums totaling more than $700 over a three-year period, police said.
Gabin, 28, of 52 Duckett Ave., was charged with two counts of auto insurance fraud, identity fraud, filing a false police report, larceny over $350, 13 counts of forgery by check, and 13 counts of uttering a forged check.
"She's beating the system all the way around," said Lawrence police Sgt. Michael Simard, the department's lead investigator on the auto insurance fraud task force.
"She staged the theft of her car. Then she lied on her insurance policy, saying she lived in Methuen instead of Lawrence, shortchanging her insurance company by $726," Simard said.
"On top of that, she used her sister's name to draw several paychecks while collecting unemployment," he said.
Investigators said Gabin received about $125 more a week than what she was entitled to collect in unemployment benefits. The state Division of Unemployment Assistance is in the process of recouping the money it overpaid.
Meanwhile, officials at the Lawrence Housing Authority are investigating whether the undocumented money Gabin earned will affect her rent status.
The latest insurance fraud case brings to 420 the number of individuals who have been charged since the task force and investigators from the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts launched their crackdown in the fall of 2003.
