David Boroff of the New York Daily News reports that 60-year-old San Diego native, Wanda Podgurski, a former Amtrak clerk, was charged with insurance fraud after investigators discovered that she had been traveling to New York, Boston, Dominican Republic, Seattle, among other destinations, with the money she had received from seven different insurance companies using the claim that she had fallen in her home seven years ago.
Wanda Podgurski created a Twitter account; a lucky break for investigators, and a sheer act of stupidity on behalf of Podgurski. Podgurski tweeted “Catch me if you can,” in June, and according to Boroff, it was just “five months after skipping out of $500,000 bail during her San Diego trial. In her absence, a judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison.”
Podgurski tweeted in late June: “Help find me before I con anyone else.” The brazen and taunting acts of Podgurski led the DA’s Computer and Technology Crime High-Tech Response Team directly to her location, and the Fugitive Task Force gained custody in Rosarito Beach Mexico on July 4th, 2013, approximately one week after the above mentioned Tweet.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis said, “The defendant in this case was brazen in both the large-scale fraud she committed and the way she mocked the criminal justice system.”