Insurance Agent Given 4-Year Sentence
A former Orange County insurance agent has been sentenced to four years in state prison for selling bogus policies to hotel and motel operators while he ran his own firm in Newport Beach from 1994 through 1996.
Timothy Allen Jones, 42, was sentenced Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court after pleading guilty to eight counts of grand theft, one count of issuing a bad check and one count of failing to appear in court. Jones, now a resident of South Lake Tahoe, was arrested there earlier this month after an investigation by Newport Beach police and the state Department of Insurance.
Jones, operating as Motel-Hotel Insurance Services, sold liability polices to hotel and motel operators, kept the premium payments for himself and did not forward the applications to the insurance underwriters. In several cases, investigators said, he paid small claims himself to conceal the fact that the policies didn’t exist.
Jones, who faced a maximum of nine years in prison on the charges, also was ordered to pay three of his victims restitution totaling $269,000.
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