A young Slovenian woman was recently sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly cutting off her hand with a circular saw in order to cash a $1.2 million insurance payout.

22-year-old Julija Adlesic allegedly conspired with her boyfriend and her father to commit insurance fraud in an attempt to collect $1.2 million in insurance payouts. The young Slovenian maintains that her injury was accidental, not premeditated, adding that no one in their right mind would want to become crippled at age 20, not for all the money in the world. However, prosecutors provided enough evidence that Adlesic and her co-conspirators had planned the so-called “accident” to get convictions against all of them. Julija got a 2-year prison sentence, her boyfriend, who was accused of putting her up to it, has been sentenced to three years in prison, while the woman’s father got a one year suspended sentence.

Photo: Jude Beck/Unsplash

“No one wants to be crippled. My youth has been destroyed, I lost my hand at the age of 20,” Julija Adlesic said during the recently-concluded trial. “Only I know how it happened.”

In early 2019, Julija Adlesic was rushed to the emergency room at a hospital in Ljubljana by her boyfriend. Her left hand was severed and the couple claimed that it had accidentally been sawed off while cutting branches at their home.

Investigators claimed that Adlesic and her boyfriend had deliberately left the severed hand at the scene of the “accident” to insure that the injury was permanent. Luckily, it was retrieved in time and reattached at the hospital. But this wasn’t the only damning evidence.

During the trial, prosecutors showed how Adlesic and her boyfriend had taken out insurance policies with five companies the year before the accident, and stood to win over $1 million in payouts. The investigation also revealed that Julia’s partner had done an internet search for prosthetic hands, which prosecutors considered conclusive evidence that the accident had actually been premeditated.

 

The verdict in this case was issued this weekend, and it was not clear if Adlesic and her alleged co-conspirators planned to launch an appeal.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first one we report on someone going to extremes to collect insurance payouts. Back in 2016 we wrote about a Vietnamese woman who had hired someone to cut off her hand so she could claim her health insurance policy.