Garden City man charged in $235K insurance fraud scheme

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A Garden City man has been charged in connection with a fraud scheme that involved allegedly underreporting payroll to insurance companies and cheating them out of $235,000 in premiums, officials said Tuesday.

Now, Vassilios Handakas, also known as William Handakas and Bill Handakas, faces second-degree insurance fraud and third-degree insurance fraud as well as failure to secure workers’ compensation.

Handakas, who is represented by Garden City-based attoney Peter Menoudakos, was released on his own recognizance and is due back in court Wednesday.

“When an employer makes misrepresentations about the number of employees at their company and their payroll figures, they unfairly impact honest employers who bear the burden of insurance fraud in the form of higher premiums and workers who may suffer an injury just to find they have no protection through worker’s compensation coverage,” Nassau District Attorney Anne Donnelly said in a written statement.

“This defendant left his workers exposed and allegedly cheated insurance companies out of hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she added.

New York State Inspector General Lucy Lang offered additional insights.

“Employers must provide workers’ compensation insurance for all employees on payroll,” Lang said in a written statement. “Failure to do so imperils a critical safety net that so many hardworking New Yorkers and their families need and deserve.”

Donnelly said that Vector Structural Corporation and Handakos entered into a contract for a workers’ compensation policy with an insurance company for coverage between March 2019 and March 2020. In the application, the company allegedly indicated that it employed two masons with an annual payroll of $50,000 a year.

But officials say that the records filed with the state by the company and by Handakas allegedly indicated that Vector had 13 employees during that time frame and a payroll of $625,466. The alleged underreporting of the employees and payroll resulted in an underpayment of insurance premiums of $197,623, officials said.

According to the DA’s office, in March 2020, Handakas and Vector allegedly repeated the underreporting of workers and payroll on its policy application with another insurance provider. The company claimed it had a payroll of $20,000, when the actual payroll according to state records was $106,452. The alleged underreporting resulted in a loss to the insurance carrier of $38,892, officials said.

If convicted of the top charge, Handakas faces a potential maximum of five to 15 years in prison.