Being a contestant on "The Price is Right" is supposed to be a fun filled experience. You hear your name called, go nuts while running down the aisle and if things work out right will find yourself winning a whole showcase worth of things that won't fit in your apartment. And if you lose you'll end up hearing that gut wrenchingly sad horn and still have a pretty good story to tell. This is the way it goes for almost all contestants on the program.
Cathy Wrench Cashwell had a different experience, her appearance on the game show proved to investigators that she had been defrauding the government through a worker's comp claim, according to The Huffington Post.
Cashwell, a former postal worker, claimed that an on the job injury had made it so she was unable to stand, sit, kneel, squat, climb, bend, reach, grasp or lift mail trays. Yet on Cashwell's 2009 appearance on the popular game show she was capable of spinning the giant wheel on two occasions, reports WRAL.
"The Price is Right" incident is not the only time that investigators were able to observe Cashwell performing physical duties that she should have been incapable of; she had been zip-lining while on vacation in 2010 and had been seen lifting furniture in 2011. Cashwell plead guilty to fraud on Monday, according to The Huffington Post.
Most of the time it is difficult for investigators to catch fraudulent workers comp cases, the average offender doesn't flaunt their physical abilities on national television.
"Sometimes you have to get in the woods and bushes," Alison Blackman, a private investigator, told WRAL. "The secret is you've got to have to have your camera up."
Blackman told WRAL that she estimates up to 30 percent of worker's comp cases in North Carolina are fraudulent. A PBS "Frontline" study in 2000 revealed for the most part that the idea that worker's comp fraud is rampant is in actuality a myth, only roughly two percent of cases end up being fraud.
Cashwell won a six night vacation in Palm Springs when she appeared on "The Price is Right," when she is sentenced in September she'll find out how much that trip actually cost her.
