Fire ravaged a recently sold home. The men who bought it are going to prison

A newly purchased home burned down weeks after it was sold in West Virginia. Then, a federal investigation ensued.

The fire was no accident, officials say. A group of men planned on destroying the house before they bought it for $5,000 in Bluefield, according to prosecutors.

Their goal was to collect $285,500 in insurance money from Allstate after submitting a fake insurance claim for the home, court documents show.

The men succeeded in setting fire to the home, but Allstate denied them the money after investigating the claim, prosecutors said.

Now, two men, ages 53 and 45, both of Bluefield, Virginia, were each sentenced March 6 to three years and five months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia.

An attorney representing one of the men declined to comment on his client’s sentencing. McClatchy News contacted an attorney representing the other for comment and didn’t immediately receive a response.

The case dates to July 2019, when one of the men approached a third man, another co-defendant in the case, about the arson scheme and directed him to buy the home before giving him the $5,000 to do so, according to his sentencing memo.

This co-defendant, 37, of Welch, was sentenced to three years and one month in prison in September after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, prosecutors said.

Ward Morgan, his attorney, told McClatchy News in a statement that his client “used poor judgment in this matter and accepted responsibility for his actions.”

Each of the men’s sentences, Morgan said, “reflected their respective degrees of culpability.”

How the arson scheme unfolded

Around the time Morgan’s client agreed to his role, he was being investigated for similar fires in McDowell County, about 40 miles west of Bluefield, West Virginia the sentencing memo says.

“When local authorities noticed him in the Bluefield area, suspicions were aroused,” the sentencing memo states.

After buying the home on July 1, he and the man who gave him the money to purchase it took out an insurance policy on it, prosecutors said. When they did, they lied and said the house was bought for $50,000 instead of $5,000, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Then, the three men decided to burn down the house in August 2019, according to prosecutors.

The 53-year-old, with the help of two others who were paid $500 each, burned down the home early in the morning on Aug. 6, 2019, prosecutors said.

The men were unaware authorities were already suspicious and had placed a hidden camera on a telephone pole across the street from the home, according to the sentencing memo.

The camera caught the men in the house before it burned down, the memo says.

After a fake insurance claim was filed with Allstate, the company spent over $13,000 investigating the matter before denying the $285,500 in insurance money the men had sought, prosecutors said.

The two most recently sentenced men were also ordered to pay $13,140 each in restitution, according to officials.

Bluefield is about 285 miles west of Richmond, Virginia.

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