After stealing over one million dollars from her elderly clients, the former Issaquah insurance agent could spend up to six years and three months in the can.
Jasmine Jamrus-Kassim was arrested last March in Kent by State Patrol troopers and investigators from the Office of the Insurance Commissioner. Kassim was desperate to leave the country after the big take and raised some red flags as she attempted to liquidate her assets by selling her house in a short sale.
Kassim was charged with 21 first degree counts of theft. This clever con artist was able to swindle the million from only five elderly residents by earning their trust and presenting herself as one of the nicest women they had ever met.
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Her process for obtaining the big score was to have her clients endorse checks to her teenage daughters’ names and proceed to bounce those checks into her own account. Kassim told her victims that she was investing their money for them and that she was not a thief.
One of her prey, an 81-year-old Bellevue man, died knowing that he got scammed out of $130,000. He passed away in January of 2011 and never got to see Kassim brought to justice.
In December 2009, the son of the Bellevue man contacted the Office of the Insurance Commissioner (OIC) to file a complaint against Kassim. Three days later, 92 year old Dorothy King also filed a complaint against her. Kassim returned $25,000 to her in an effort to convince the woman of her innocence.
The act of cashing her clients’ annuity checks was what eventually got this cold-hearted monster caught. That and the fact that she started doing irrational things with the money like donating $20,000 to the Online Psychic Network website in January of 2009.
Because her victims were viewed as extremely vulnerable (they were 74-90 years of age) prosecutors pushed for an exceptional sentence of five years, eight months and got more than they originally asked for; the standard sentence range is three years, seven months to four years, nine months.