You lie, you lose: Mississippi man sentenced to ten years for oil spill fraud
February 3, 2015A 34-year-old D’Iberville, Mississippi man was sentenced last week to 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud.
Jason Richard Woodcock was ordered to serve three years of supervised release after his release from prison for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
Woodcock was also ordered to pay restitution to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility of $105,383.76 and about $17,000 to the Mississippi Department of Employment Security.
Woodcock and co-conspirators filed fraudulent oil spill claims with the GCCF for alleged lost earnings and profits as a result of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Woodcock claimed to have lost his job as a marketing representative at JW Consulting LLC in Gulfport becasue of the spill. He also conspired to submit other oil spill claims for other individuals from a fictional company called “Gulf South Seafood.”
The fraud resulted in a loss to the GCCF of about $105,000. If the entire scheme had gone ahead, the loss for the GCCF would have been more than $400,000, the Justice Department said.