Cost of Insurance Fraud

Fraudulent insurance claims total 1.9 billion pounds a year and adds an average of 44 pounds to the annual cost paid by policyholders.

An added expense, insurers don’t think that customers should be paying for and are making fraud investigation a priority.

Here are a couple of examples of the type of insurance scams that are making the headlines.

Crash for Cash Traffic Accidents

Reported recently was an event that occurred in Manchester, England concerning a crash for cash insurance fraud.

The offender would be paid a fee by a car owner to knowingly cause his vehicle to be involved in an accident, with the premise that they could claim the third party’s insurance company for compensation, court costs and courtesy cars.

It is important to know that if you start a fraud investigation against someone who claims that they were involved in an accident, you must have a quality plan and photographic evidence of the accident as these will needed to be produced in court.

For this you need to supply a map of the location and a concise statement of the facts and what you will get in return is a detailed report and photographs clearly showing the scene and a sketch giving measurements of the roads, plus statements from witnesses and police.

In the case of acquiring evidence, it is important that you get all the details so that the lawyer has access to the best available evidence.

Payment Protection Insurance Fraud

This is committed by people taking PPI to cover loans, credit cards and other monetary agreements.

Basically anything that they can take out a large sum of money on and then use the insurance to pay it back.

The main ways of claiming on insurance policies are feigned illness and claimed unemployment.

It will not be the first time that someone has claimed to have suffered a debilitating injury that prevents them from working and paying off their credit legitimately, only to have a fraud investigation surveillance team capture video of them doing somersaults on the trampoline in the back garden.

These allegations can be investigated to help determine the truth by hiring fraud investigation operatives to collect and collate evidence in the form of video, photos and detailed written reports.

Surveillance should preferably be carried out by a male and female team members, who will physically follow an individual from a designated location and then take video and still images without the subject being aware. As an alternative the installation of covert day and night CCTV cameras may be a more suitable option.