A university clerk in Brazil Vanderley dos Santos Gomes has been convicted of fraud after arranging for his own foot to be surgically amputated and claiming it was hacked off during a violent robbery, in an attempt to collect £220,000 from four separate insurance policies.
Vanderley dos Santos Gomes, a technical administrative assistant at the Federal University of Reconcavo da Bahia in the state of Bahia, took out four life and personal accident insurance policies in June and July 2019 that would have paid out a combined total of 1.5 million Brazilian reais — around £220,050 — if he became permanently disabled. Weeks later, he claimed he had been kidnapped by gangsters who had hacked off his right foot with a machete. He was found injured in a rural area near the village of Merces in São Gonçalo dos Campos, with his severed foot later discovered inside a backpack alongside belongings he had reported stolen. He filed his insurance claims on 15 August 2019, just days after the alleged attack.
The sheer scale of the scheme quickly raised suspicions. Investigators noted that Gomes held a secure, well-regarded civil service position at the university, yet his salary offered no obvious explanation for why he had taken out several expensive policies in quick succession. The combination of multiple policies, their high value and the extremely short gap between the contracts and the injury triggered alarm among both insurers and police.
The case unravelled when forensic experts examined the injury itself. Gomes had told police and insurers that armed criminals had amputated his foot using a machete during a violent attack, but forensic analysis told a different story. Experts concluded the amputation was far too clean and precise to have been carried out in such circumstances, and determined it had instead been performed using specialist surgical techniques — indicating that Gomes had arranged for it to be carried out deliberately.
Despite denying he had planned the scheme or inflicted the injury himself, and despite his defence seeking an acquittal on the grounds of insufficient evidence, judges at the Bahia Court of Justice upheld his conviction after reviewing forensic reports, insurance records, medical evidence and witness testimony. An attempt to take the case to Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice was also rejected.
Gomes was sentenced to two years in prison, later converted to 720 hours of community service and a financial penalty of £1,113. He began serving his sentence in May this year after exhausting all appeals. Lawyers representing the insurance companies described it as one of the most unusual fraud investigations they had encountered.
