The Associate office of Public Prosecutor on Fraud managed to sentence a woman, surnamed Meneses Rojas, to 15 years in prison. She was found guilty of scam.
She was responsable of 140 offenses of forgery and use of 140 false documents. The sentence was issued by the Criminal Court of the First Judicial Circuit of San José, on November 18th.
She must also pay 41,744.63 dollars to the National Insurance Institute (INS) to compensate the damages caused.
The incident occurred on November 28, 2007, when the accused bought a traveler’s policy in Juan Santamaría International Airport to travel to Lima, Peru.
After returning home, the woman filed a complaint with the INS, staying that during the trip, she had suffered from a disease that made her be unconscious for three days in the hotel room where she was staying. For this reason, she had to be transferred to a private clinic.
As evidence before the INS, she presented 86 documents including clinical receipt and bank statements, which informed about the amount of total expenditure, for the non-existent medical care in Peru.
The Prosecutor’s Office found that these were false documents. The accused’s profits were $ 41.744,43.
In addition, authorities found that the accused submitted another complaint to the INS (in which the charge would be $ 90,017.57) in order to receive compensation for the alleged traffic accident that she suffered, once again, in Peru in 2009.
At that time, Rojas said that she had been struck in a public road and the vehicle fled the scene, leaving her unconscious. According to her, she was taken to the same clinic as before.
The accused declared that at that time, she contacted “her friend” former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to tell him what happened, so he sent an ambulance plane with three doctors, two nurses, a pilot, a co-pilot and a flight engineer, to transfer her from Peru to Costa Rica.
However, the prosecution proved, with the collaboration of the Embassy of Venezuela, that the accused never used an aircraft from that country and if it were true, it would have been a helicopter and it would be impossible to conduct a tour from Venezuela to Peru and from Peru to Costa Rica.
Because on both occasions the accused gave similar versions and she even mentioned that she could not contact the INS service manager because she was traveling alone, an investigation was initiated against her.