Woman faked death to claim $800k life insurance

A woman has been jailed for two years and three months after faked her own death in an apparent hockey accident to collect $800,000 in life insurance.

A woman who faked her own death in an apparent hockey accident to collect $800,000 in life insurance and then tried to repeat the fraud has been jailed for three years and two months.

Rotorua woman Mary-Rose Ponce Calderon appeared in the Auckland District Court in April for forgery, money laundering and fraud-related charges.

Sentencing notes released this week reveal that in April, 2015, she used her maiden name Mary-Rose Kereopa to get a $800,000 life insurance policy with Asteron Life.

Calderon listed someone called Sharon Snow as the beneficiary of the policy, who purportedly lived at Calderon's home and had the same phone number.

Only days after the policy was issued, Calderon contacted Asteron pretending to be Snow.

She told Asteron that Calderon had died in an accident involving a hockey ball strike to her head.

She then forged and altered documents to support her claim, including records of apparent consultations with doctors.

Calderon applied for and was issued a death certificate in the name of Mary-Rose Kereopa. She also altered her bank statements to make it appear that her accounts were held in Snow's name.

That June she received the $800,000 from Asteron.

The following year Calderon took out another life insurance policy with Pinnacle Life for $1 million and listed her mother listed as the beneficiary.

A month after the policy was issued, Calderon pretended to be her mother and contacted Pinnacle claiming her daughter had died of a heart attack.

More documents were forged to try support the claim. Calderon then tried the ruse on a third life insurer, AA Life.

However, Pinnacle and AA Life flagged the claims as suspicious as suspicious and Calderon was eventually charged by the police.

At Calderon's sentencing, Judge Russell Collins said she had made a "deliberate, sustained, premeditated, calculated attempts to defraud the victims of substantial amounts of money".

Half a million dollars of the $800,000 Calderon received from Asteron Life is unlikely to be recovered, he said.

"On any view of the matter, that is a substantial fraud," he said.

Other than $180,000 spent on a Rotorua property, most of the money was spent on international travel, vehicle hire and living expenses.

While taking into account her guilty plea, her lack of previous convictions and "adversity" suffered in her younger life, Calderon received no extra credit for remorse at her sentencing.

"I am just simply not persuaded that you are remorseful for what you have done. I have no doubt that you are overwhelmingly remorseful for the situation in which you find yourself," Judge Collins said.

"And secondly, there can be no credit, in my view, for any offers to make amends. The reality here is, that the victims will pursue you for every dollar that they can recover in the civil jurisdiction and any orders that I make would be quite meaningless in light of the recovery mechanisms they will have in other court," he said.

He sentenced her to three years and two months in jail but did not impose a minimum period of imprisonment.