The leaders of a $180 million scheme to sell Affordable Care Act insurance plans to homeless people and others who did not qualify were sentenced to 20 years in federal prison and full restitution.
Cory Loyd, 47, who was a licensed insurance broker in Florida and head of FloridaCare Insurance, and Steven Strong, 43, the marketing leader in the scheme, were convicted in November in federal court in Miami, after an investigation by a federal health care fraud task force, the U.S. Attorney for the district announced.
“As proven at trial, Lloyd and Strong targeted vulnerable, low-income individuals experiencing homelessness, unemployment, and mental health and substance abuse disorders, and, through ‘street marketers’ working on their behalf, sometimes offered bribes to induce those individuals to enroll in subsidized ACA plans,” prosecutors said in a statement this week.
Evidence at trial showed that Lloyd and Strong exchanged text messages bragging about the money they were making and belittling the people they signed up, prosecutors said. In one text exchange, Strong suggested to Lloyd that the pair send street marketers into hurricane shelters in Florida. Lloyd replied, “It’s a killer idea, if we could pull it off! … I want to rake the shelters! R*pe.” Strong replied: “Haha I’m not kidding.”
The pair were warned early on about their apparent violations, prosecutors said.
“At the outset of the scheme, even after Strong was warned by federal regulators that his conduct breached program requirements and stripped of his federal insurance registration, he persisted in this scheme to circumvent those program requirements and take advantage of desperate populations,” reads a sentencing memorandum filed last week by federal prosecutors.
“Both Defendants had concerns about the risks and knew what they were doing was wrong,” the memo reads. “But for years, the Defendants relied on untrained and unlicensed street marketers—some convicted felons—that the Defendants knew took advantage of disadvantaged populations, bribed consumers to enroll, fabricated enrollment information, and stole consumers’ identities.”
A third defendant, Dafud Iza, formerly vice president of Fiorella Insurance Agency, in Stuart, Florida, plead guilty in 2025. He agreed to provide information about his co-defendants and was sentenced in January to three years in prison.
Read more about Iza here. Read more about Loyd and Strong here.
Topics
Agencies
Fraud
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