A South Florida woman is back in trouble with the law after allegedly running unlicensed post-surgery recovery homes, even after the state told her to stop. Her name is Torrasha Monique Smith, and she’s 42 years old.
Smith was taken into custody in Houston, Texas, and later appeared in Miami-Dade bond court. The charge that brought her in is organized scheme to defraud over $50,000, along with three counts of grand theft and 274 counts tied to running an assisted living facility without a license. All together, that adds up to 278 felony charges.
This Isn’t Her First Time
Here’s the thing that makes this case stand out. Investigators say Smith had already been arrested before for the exact same kind of operation. She was first arrested in January 2024 for running an unlicensed post-surgery facility at one address, then arrested again in 2025 after opening up another one at a different location on Southwest 132nd Court.
According to the arrest warrant, Smith kept the business going through a company called Dream Body Retreat. Patients told deputies they paid for services through Zelle, and investigators say Smith was the sole owner of that business.
The state had already issued her a Notice of Unlicensed Activity back on April 30, 2025, basically ordering her to shut things down. Instead, authorities say she kept the facility running for 274 more days. During that stretch, she reportedly took in more than $200,000 through Zelle payments.
Patients Left Stuck
It gets worse for the people who trusted her with their recovery care. Investigators say that at some point, Smith stopped actually running the facility but kept booking appointments and collecting deposits anyway, with no plan to provide any services at all.
Several people filed police reports after paying deposits to Dream Body Retreat, only to find out the place had closed. When they tried reaching Smith for refunds, they couldn’t get a hold of her.
Her attorney, Richard Moncada, pushed back a bit on the sheer number of charges during her bond hearing. He pointed out that the 274 counts seem to line up with the number of days the facility was allegedly open, not the number of patients involved, so the charges might not tell the full story on their own.
A Bigger Pattern in South Florida
Smith’s case isn’t happening in a vacuum. Unlicensed post-surgery recovery homes have become a real problem across Miami-Dade County, driven partly by the growing number of people traveling to South Florida for cosmetic surgery. Getting a facility properly licensed takes real work, inspections, paperwork, zoning compliance, and some operators just skip all of that.
The risk isn’t just financial either. Patients recovering from surgery need real medical oversight, and when that’s missing, things can go seriously wrong. There have been other cases in the area involving unlicensed homes, including one where a young mother died during her recovery stay.
For now, Smith’s case is still working its way through the courts, and it’s a reminder of how often these unlicensed operations manage to pop back up even after getting shut down once.