WCDefenseCA

Do the names Anton Buitendag or Yolandi Kohrumel sound familiar? Perhaps they should.  Almost every defense attorney and adjuster has a Buitendag or Kohrumel in their history.  Both were recently sentenced to jail terms for an insurance fraud scam that cost insurers (you can read that as consumers, by the way, because they will ultimately pay the price for this) $1.5 million.

Here’s the adventure, for background: Kohrumel has a box fall on her toe.  She undergoes surgery, but says she can’t use the crutches she’s given, so she gets a wheel chair.  The wheel chair then gives her carpal tunnel syndrome, so she got an electric wheelchair.  She also claimed her feet continued to be hypersensitive and that she was experiencing complex regional pain syndrome, depression, and anxiety (bring on the pills!)

After her temporary disability benefits dried up, she claimed she needed round-the-clock care, which was provided by her husband and then her father (how much does in home care with 8 hours regular pay and 16 hours overtime get you?)

But the fun didn’t stop there.  Kohrumel demanded a larger apartment (her two-bedroom was too small for her wheel chair), and Buitendag demanded to be paid even though he had no right to work in the United States (this argument failed previously in another case where the in-home-care/spouse was an illegal alien).

So here’s where the party ended: the insurance company hired movers to help Kohrumel move to her wheelchair accessible mansion but the lazy bums weren’t working fast enough, so Kohrumel summoned her super-human strength to get out of her wheelchair and move heavy boxes around.  “Gee, that’s odd…”

Now that we’re in the age of smartphones, everyone is a journalist, so the movers then videotaped Kohrumel showing the movers how it’s done.

In the investigation that followed 20 boxes were recovered from her garage with unused prescription medication.

In case you missed it… this all started with a broken toe.  But why would anyone be cynical about workers’ comp?