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In May of 1991, Thongkam Somsanuk purchased a $500,000 life insurance policy from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office in Alexandria, Virginia. Just one month later he was dead: a victim of heart failure during a trip to Thailand.
Metropolitan initially balked at the claim because there was no way to verify the circumstances of the death and because the widow had ordered her husband’s body cremated immediately after his death. After receiving a letter from an official who stated he had witnessed the cremation. Metropolitan paid the face value of the policy. Case closed. For awhile…
In 1993, Metropolitan received an anonymous letter stating that the deceased was alive and well in Bangkok, using an assumed name. He didn’t look the same, the letter stated, because he’d had cosmetic surgery. A second anonymous letter was received, advising of an upcoming trip to the US. The information was turned over to the FBI and an investigation began.
Of interest to investigators was a house purchased in November of 1993. The son of the deceased man had bought the Manassas property with a man named Thongchai Yensamut. And Yensamut had married the widow Somsanuk in December 1994. Further checking revealed that Yensamut and (the widow) Somsanuk had entered the US on the very same day in 1993 from Thailand, he through Chicago and she through New York.
Yensamut had traveled to the US on a visa and remained beyond the expiration date. An INS agent, investigating whether Yensamut had overstayed his visa, fingerprinted “husband number two. “When those prints were compared to prints taken from “husband number one’s” permanent resident alien application of 1979, they were found to be a perfect match.
The wife and her “two” husbands have been charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and aiding and abetting. Each fraud carries a maximum fine of $250,000 and five years incarceration.
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