Jose Salvador Lantigua, Bank Fraud and Life Insurance Scam, FL 2023

Jose Salvador Lantigua, 63, of Jacksonville, Florida, was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Corrigan for bank fraud and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. His scheme? Faking his own death to collect more than $6.6 million in life insurance payouts — a con so elaborate it involved fake diseases, a sham cremation, and a rogue CIA cover story. The reality: a desperate bid to escape mounting debt from his failing furniture store, Circle K.

Lantigua owned and operated Circle K in Jacksonville, a business drowning in financial trouble by 2012. To keep it afloat, he turned to lenders with a stack of fraudulent documents, securing $2 million in loans from a Jacksonville bank through deception. But as pressure mounted, he hatched a far more audacious plan. In January 2013, he lied to his wife, Daphne Simpson, claiming he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease — ‘Mad Cow’ — and only months to live. He told her he’d seek treatment in Colombia, then abruptly changed the story: no disease, just a deadly past tied to a military ‘team’ that killed a cartel leader and a rogue CIA agent out for revenge.

The story was pure fiction. But Simpson believed it. Lantigua convinced her their families were in danger and that he needed to vanish — by faking his death. In April 2013, he traveled to Margarita Island, Venezuela, where he bought a sham death certificate and a fraudulent cremation document. Simpson joined him shortly after, used the fake paperwork to obtain an official certificate of death abroad, and returned to Jacksonville to set the next phase in motion.

By June 2013, Simpson began filing death benefit claims with seven life insurance companies, claiming her husband died from complications of CJD during medical treatment in Venezuela. Lantigua had taken out seven policies totaling over $6.6 million. Suspicion flared at several insurers. Only three paid out — $871,067.11 in total. The fraud was already unraveling, but the couple wasn’t done. That fall, Simpson took a cruise to the Bahamas to reunite with Lantigua, where they paid $5,000 to be smuggled back into the U.S. on a fishing boat.

Back in America, Lantigua assumed the alias Harry Fields. He traveled by bus to Jacksonville, where Simpson picked him up and drove him to a house they’d bought years earlier in Cashiers, North Carolina. On September 30, 2014, he walked into a North Carolina DMV and fraudulently obtained a driver’s license under his false name. Less than two months later, he applied for a U.S. passport at a post office in North Carolina — again using the fake identity. That’s when federal agents caught up with him. Officials flagged the suspicious passport application and linked it to a prior passport issued under his real name.

On March 21, 2015, Special Agents from the State Department and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations staked out the Cashiers home used in the fraud, confronted Lantigua, and took him into custody. His wife, Daphne Simpson, was sentenced to five years’ probation but had already served 17 months in pretrial detention. Both are ordered to make full restitution to the victims of the fraud. They pleaded guilty in September 2016, closing a bizarre chapter of lies, forged documents, and a death that never happened.