A federal judge in Hammond, Indiana, sentenced a longtime local insurance agent to nearly six years in prison this month for building a fraud scheme on top of his own clients’ identities. Thomas J. Lemmen, 51, of Schererville, held a state insurance license for more than a decade before prosecutors say he used it to write thousands of life insurance policies that his clients never asked for and never signed. Most of the people whose names ended up on those policies were retirees and elderly residents of Northwest Indiana — the very clients who trusted him to protect their families’ finances, not raid them.
A License Used to Loot, Not Protect
Lemmen worked as a licensed independent insurance agent in Indiana beginning in 2012, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud before U.S. District Judge Gretchen S. Lund handed down the sentence. Between 2020 and 2022, he ran what prosecutors describe as a Ponzi-style operation: rather than selling policies to people who wanted them, he wrote large volumes of new life insurance contracts simply to generate commission income, regardless of whether the person named as the policyholder had agreed to anything.
On thousands of separate occasions, Lemmen wrote policies in the names of current, former and prospective clients without their knowledge or consent, prosecutors said. To make the paperwork look legitimate, he forged the digital signatures of the people he listed as applicants, including on medical records releases — authorizations that gave insurance companies access to those clients’ private medical and pharmacy histories. He didn’t need to steal any new personal information to do it; as their longtime agent, he already had their names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and family details on file.
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More Than 2,000 Policies, Over $5 Million in Commissions
By the time the scheme fell apart, Lemmen had written more than 2,000 fraudulent life insurance policies in the names of hundreds of victims. Each new policy triggered a commission payment from the insurer, and prosecutors say he collected more than $5 million in commissions he was never entitled to receive over the roughly two-and-a-half-year run of the scheme. Spread across more than 2,000 policies, that works out to an average of roughly $2,500 in commission per fraudulent policy — a reminder that a scheme built on modest individual payouts can still add up to a multimillion-dollar loss when it runs at volume.
That money didn’t go toward covering claims or repaying anyone. Prosecutors said Lemmen used the proceeds to keep the scheme running and to fund his own spending, including home renovations, an outdoor pool at his house, and frequent travel.
Retirees Carried Most of the Cost
Most of Lemmen’s identity-theft victims were retirees and elderly residents of Northwest Indiana, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. That detail carries a real financial cost for a household: a life insurance policy opened in someone’s name without consent can resurface for years afterward — in a credit-monitoring alert, a medical-records disclosure log, or a beneficiary dispute a family only discovers after a death.
The pattern isn’t unique to one Indiana insurance book. The FBI’s Elder Fraud page reports that seniors lose more than $7 billion a year nationwide to financial fraud and confidence schemes, a total driven in part by the savings, home equity and long professional relationships that make older clients an attractive target.
Elder-fraud cases most often draw attention when they involve a stranger — a caller posing as a grandchild in trouble, a tech-support pop-up, a lottery notification. Lemmen’s scheme worked because it didn’t require any of that. He was already a familiar, licensed professional with legitimate access to the personal and financial details his victims had shared to protect their families, which is exactly why the fraud went undetected for so long.
Two and a Half Years Before Anyone Caught Up With Him
Lemmen’s scheme ran from 2020 until 2022, and prosecutors said he took what they called sophisticated steps to make the fictitious policies look legitimate and avoid detection for more than two years. The case was investigated by the FBI, with assistance from the U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee for Region 10, and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Zachary D. Heater.
State regulators moved separately and earlier than the federal sentencing. In April 2023, the Indiana Department of Insurance took administrative action to block Lemmen from renewing his license to sell insurance in the state, cutting off his ability to write new policies well before his criminal case reached a courtroom.
70 Months, $1.6 Million in Restitution
U.S. District Judge Gretchen S. Lund sentenced Lemmen on September 2, 2026, to 70 months in federal prison, to be followed by two years of supervised release. She also ordered him to pay $1,601,505.27 in restitution to the people harmed by the scheme, a figure the U.S. Attorney’s Office ties directly to the losses caused by the fraudulent policies. Even if paid in full, that restitution order won’t necessarily make every victim whole: prosecutors said much of the more than $5 million in commissions went toward home renovations, an outdoor pool and travel rather than anything easily recovered years later.
The Justice Department listed the case under its Elder Justice Initiative, the department’s standing effort to coordinate prosecutions of crimes that specifically target older Americans’ finances and identities.
The Investigators’ Case for Accountability
Officials who worked the case framed it as a breach of a professional relationship that hundreds of families depended on. U.S. Attorney Adam L. Mildred said in the announcement that Lemmen “betrayed that trust and fraudulently obtained millions of dollars” that were never his to take.
FBI Indianapolis Special Agent in Charge Timothy J. O’Malley described the case in blunter terms, saying Lemmen exploited his position for personal gain at the expense of clients who included seniors he was supposed to be serving. The case closes with a prison sentence and a restitution order, but the $1,601,505.27 figure is also a reminder of how much money can move through a single insurance license before anyone outside the office notices.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
