The Miami lawyer who forged 114 judges' signatures on structured settlement orders
Jose Manuel Camacho, a Miami lawyer with a high-volume structured settlement practice, was charged in February 2016 with forging the signatures of at least seven Broward County judges on 114 court orders approving structured settlement transfers, rather than waiting for the judges to sign off themselves. Florida law requires a judge to approve any structured settlement transfer. The forgeries were discovered after a judge noticed an order bearing her signature carried a date on which she had been out of town. Camacho was sentenced in August 2017 to 364 days in jail and 10 years of probation.
- Year
- 2017
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Sentenced
- Victims
- Not stated in the sources
- Schemes
- Structured settlement purchase fraud
- Last reviewed
- 2026-10-15
The facts, as recorded
- Camacho's criminal case was transferred from Broward Circuit Court to Miami-Dade Circuit Court; he faced 14 counts of forgery for allegedly signing the names of seven different judges on the documents.
- Investigators said Camacho signed judges' names on 114 documents.
- Florida law requires a judge to approve a structured settlement transfer, which pays the recipient a lump sum in exchange for giving up future scheduled payouts.
- An arrest report said Camacho admitted forging the judges' signatures and filing the documents with the clerk of courts.
- Camacho's forgeries were discovered after Judge Marina Garcia-Wood noticed that an order bearing her signature carried a date on which she had been out of town.
- Camacho was able to file the forged orders himself because, at the time, lawyers were permitted to take signed orders directly to the clerk's office without separate court-clerk verification; Broward County now requires a court clerk's own involvement in that step.
- Camacho was sentenced in August 2017 to 364 days in jail and 10 years of probation.
Why this case matters
Every other case on this page involves money changing hands at an unfair price. This one shows the same legal safeguard, a judge’s own signed approval, defeated without a single dollar figure attached: Camacho was not accused of profiting from the forgeries themselves, only of manufacturing the court’s approval so his structured settlement transactions could close faster than Broward County’s backlogged docket allowed.
A safeguard that depended entirely on trust
Florida, like every other state, requires a judge to personally approve a structured settlement transfer. That requirement only works if the signature on the order is real. Camacho’s forgeries went undetected for an unknown period across 114 separate filings naming seven different judges, not because the forgery itself was especially sophisticated, but because nothing in the filing process at the time required anyone other than the filing lawyer to confirm a judge’s signature was genuine before the order took legal effect.
Caught by a calendar, not an audit
The case unraveled over a single inconsistency: a judge recognized her own signature on an order dated to a day she was not in Broward County at all. That is a strikingly low-tech way for a 114-document forgery scheme to surface, and it points to how little independent verification existed in the court’s own process at the time, the same structural gap this scheme’s other cases exploit in different ways.
The caveat
Camacho was sentenced to 364 days in jail and 10 years of probation after the forgery charges; the reporting available for this page does not establish whether he entered a formal guilty plea or was convicted at trial, so this page states only the charges and the sentence actually imposed. Neither source used here quantifies a specific dollar loss to any individual settlement seller, and this page does not claim one; the documented harm is to the integrity of the court’s own approval process, not a disclosed financial loss to a named victim.
Sources
- Lawyer is accused of forging judges' signatures on more than 100 documents. ABA Journal. Accessed 2026-10-15. Supports: The February 2016 charges, the 14 counts and seven judges, the 114 forged documents, the transfer to Miami-Dade Circuit Court, and Camacho's admission in the arrest report.
- Lawyer who forged judges' signatures on more than 100 documents is sentenced. ABA Journal. Accessed 2026-10-15. Supports: The August 2017 sentence of 364 days in jail and 10 years of probation, Camacho's stated motive of avoiding delays from backlogged judges, the discovery through Judge Garcia-Wood's out-of-town date, and Broward County's subsequent procedural change.