July 14, 2025 – LOS ANGELES, CA – A Nevada woman was sentenced on Monday, July 7, 2025, to 50 months in federal prison for 
defrauding a lender out of $3.7 million by submitting bogus applications for fine art insurance policies for commercial clients, but instead using the money for herself.
Image by Ray Shrewsberry • Ray_Shrewsberry from Pixabay
Tonja Van Roy, 59, of Las Vegas, but who formerly operated a Northridge-based insurance agency, was sentenced on July 7, 2025, by United States District Judge Stephen V. Wilson, who also ordered her to pay $1,880,237 in restitution.
Van Roy pleaded guilty on January 6 to one count of wire fraud.
According to court documents, Van Roy owned and ran Pegasus Insurance, a Northridge company that specialized in insurance policies covering art collections. From January 2021 to December 2023, Van Roy created and submitted dozens of fraudulent finance agreements to AFCO Credit Corp., a Lake Forest, Illinois-based provider of insurance premium finance, purportedly to finance insurance policies she claimed to have sold to art galleries.
Van Roy made up the insurance policy numbers she used and forged the electronic signatures for fictitious insureds. She used the borrowed money to fund her lifestyle, which included payments on dozens of credit cards. When the loans from AFCO came due, Van Roy submitted additional fraudulent finance agreements to AFCO, and used the proceeds from the new loans to make it appear as though the old loans had been repaid.
“[Van Roy] embarked on a sophisticated, multiyear scheme to borrow fraudulently over $3.7 million dollars using her insider’s knowledge of the insurance industry,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “[She] has more than 25 years of experience working as an insurance agent, during which time she sold countless insurance policies and worked for many different insurance agencies before founding her own; she had an expert’s understanding of the industry, which allowed her to manipulate her victims and avoid detection for years.”
Homeland Security Investigations and the California Department of Insurance investigated this matter.
Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Brown of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.
Source: DOJ Release
