A former Minnesota insurance broker has been convicted of three felony counts of insurance fraud.

Jeremy Lee Olson, 46, has been sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay more than $22,000 in restitution to 12 different victims.

Olson was charged in April with four counts of felony insurance fraud, two felony counts of aggravated forgery and one felony count of issuance of a dishonored check. In a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to three felony insurance fraud counts and the remaining charges were dismissed, according to a report by The West Central Tribune.

Prosecutors said that Olson, who owned the Montevideo Insurance Center until October 2016, was accepting insurance premiums from clients but not actually applying them to those clients’ policies. As a result, clients lost coverage without realizing it.

In one case, a client who suffered a house fire couldn’t collect the full coverage amount for damaged vehicles because the policy had been cancelled. The incident resulted in a $5,864 loss to the client, according to the Tribune.

The scam was discovered when Olson sold Montevideo Insurance Center and the new owners began to notice discrepancies between billing and actual policies that Olson had handled, the Tribune reported.

Olson’s sentence included 30 days in the Chippewa County, Minn., jail, but he will not have to serve jail time if he passes the restitution, follows the terms of his probation and completes 80 hours of community service. He also received a stay of imposition – meaning that if he completes all the portions of his sentence, his felony convictions may be changed to misdemeanors in his record, the Tribune reported.


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