State Farm Denied Pretrial Fraud Win Against Whistleblowers

State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. didn’t show that Hurricane Katrina whistleblowers committed fraud by taking documents from the State Farm computer system under an extortion scheme to win civil settlements following threats of disclosure, a Mississippi federal court said.

State Farm hasn’t adequately demonstrated how or whether whistleblowers Cori and Kerri Rigsby accessed a “protected computer” to trigger liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Judge Halil Suleyman Ozerden of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi said Tuesday.

Evidence doesn’t clearly show that the Rigsbys committed common law fraud or breached a contract with ...