WCIS #04- National Prearranged Services: The $500 Million Funeral Fraud (1992–2008)

For sixteen years, a company called National Prearranged Services (NPS) promised peace of mind: pay for your funeral in advance so your family wouldn’t have to decide in grief. Headquartered in Missouri, NPS sold prepaid funeral plans across sixteen U.S. states and appeared to manage hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer trust funds.Behind the brochures and polished audits, those funds were never safe.Instead of placing prepaid funeral money into legally required trust accounts, NPS executives routed the deposits through a web of affiliated insurance companies and shell entities controlled by the same family. Money meant to sit untouched for decades was siphoned off to finance luxury homes, private aircraft, real estate ventures, and insider loans—while falsified reports kept regulators in the dark.When the scheme collapsed in 2008, nearly 97,000 families discovered their “fully funded” funeral plans were empty. The missing amount—estimated between $450 and $600 million—forced funeral directors to bury people at their own expense, absorb catastrophic losses, or turn families away in the worst moments of their lives.This episode examines one of the largest funeral fraud cases in U.S. history, the federal prosecution of Doug Cassity, and how fragmented state oversight allowed a pyramid scheme built on grief to survive for over a decade.Topics: true crime, funeral industry scandals, prepaid funeral fraud, deathcare ethics, financial crime, consumer protection failures, institutional oversight, unclaimed trust funds, U.S. federal fraud cases.

If you want to prepare your Will or a Trust, check our Partner at trust&will .(*)

If you want to know more about us visit our website charons-intern.com

* this is an affiliate link. We might earn a commission from any purchase you might make under this Link at no extra charge for you. Thank you for your support.