On July 7, 2025, Tonja Van Roy — a 59-year-old formerly licensed California insurance agent and owner of Pegasus Insurance, a Northridge-based agency specializing in fine art and art collection coverage — was sentenced to 50 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1,880,237 in restitution after pleading guilty on January 6, 2025, to one federal count of wire fraud before U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson of the Central District of California. Between January 2021 and December 2023, Van Roy submitted dozens of fraudulent premium finance agreement forms to AFCO Credit Corporation, a Lake Forest, Illinois-based premium finance company, falsely certifying that she had sold insurance policies to art galleries and private collectors across Southern California. The policy numbers on the agreements were fictitious, the client signatures were forged, and the purported insureds either did not exist or had authorized nothing. As each round of fraudulent loans came due, Van Roy paid them off with proceeds from new fraudulent applications, running a classic Ponzi structure inside the embezzlement for nearly three years. In total, AFCO wired more than $3.7 million in loan proceeds directly into Van Roy's trust account, which she spent on credit card payments and personal expenses. The scheme unraveled after AFCO filed a complaint with the California Department of Insurance, whose investigators discovered that across dozens of applications listing dozens of different supposed clients, only two physical addresses appeared in the address fields — both of them rental properties occupied by Van Roy herself.