A Minnesota man has been sentenced to three years in prison for faking his own death to collect a $2million life insurance policy.
Igor Vorotinov, formerly of Maple Grove, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud in May and was sentenced Monday in US District Court.
The 55-year-old was ordered to serve 41 months in prison plus three years of supervised release and to pay back $2,048,414.09 in restitution.
Authorities alleged that Vorotinov dressed a corpse in his clothes and planted his identification on the body before dumping it on the side of a road in the former Soviet republic of Moldova in 2011.
Moldovan authorities discovered the body and identified it as Vorotinov's, determining that he had died of a heart attack.
Vorotinov hatched the scheme alongside his wife Irina, 51, and 29-year-old son Alkon in 2010.
The couple took out the life insurance policy in spring that year with Irina as the primary beneficiary before they divorced.
The following year, Volotinov apparently died while on a trip to Moldova in eastern Europe, and Irina flew to Moldova and falsely identified the body as her husband in the presence of US Embassy official.
She then had the remains cremated and put into an urn which she brought back to the US an had interred in a mausoleum in Minneapolis.
Insurance company Mutual of Omaha sent his ex-wife a $2million check in 2012.
After cashing the check, the money was transferred to her son and to accounts in Switzerland and Moldova, authorities said.