Fraud case got its start in LFP

Published 11:54 am Monday, March 3, 2008

A case that started with a Lake Forest Park Police probe into credit-card fraud and led to the Stevens Hospital emergency room has ended with a Seattle woman heading to prison.

Yvon Lafaye Hennings, 47, was sentenced Friday, Jan. 26, in U.S. District Court in Seattle to four months in prison, four months of home detention and three years of supervised release. She was ordered to pay $18,098 in restitution.

Hennings admitted that she stole credit card information from her employer, a medical billing firm. The credit card information was from patients who had recently seen doctors at the Stevens Hospital emergency room.

According to records filed in the case, the Lake Forest Park Police started getting reports in late 2004 of unauthorized credit card purchases over the Internet. Many of the purchases were for gift cards that could be exchanged for cash.

“It turned out to be a multi-jurisdictional case,” said Lake Forest Park Police Chief Dennis Peterson. “We were the only agency that took the case, because it originated with one of our residents.”

After an initial unauthorized credit card purchase was reported by a Lake Forest Park resident, the investigation took less than one year to complete, said Peterson, adding that it “blew up into a big case.”

According to the records, the victims had one thing in common: all had recently visited the Stevens Hospital emergency room and had used their credit card for payment.

The investigation revealed that Yvon Hennings, an employee of the medical billing company MedData, had stolen the credit card numbers and other identifying information and had provided them to her brother, Lennie Hennings.

It was the emergency physicians group that had a contract with MedData and Stevens Hospital and not the hospital itself, according to Beth Engel, a spokeswoman for Stevens. The hospital does not give out confidential information on patients who visit Stevens’ emergency room, Engel emphasized.

Lennie Hennings used the credit cards for about $20,000 worth of purchases.

Yvon Hennings pleaded guilty Aug. 17, 2006.

Lennie Hennings pleaded guilty Dec. 19, 2006, and is scheduled to be sentenced in March.

“Ms. Hennings is a poster child for a growing problem in this district, the theft of personal identification information by insiders,” assistant U.S. attorney Vince Lombardi said. “Ms. Hennings’ crime is particularly egregious because she was often victimizing people who had already suffered some type of misfortune; patients who had used their credit cards to pay for emergency room medical services.”

The case was investigated by the Lake Forest Park Police Department and the FBI and was prosecuted by Lombardi.