Insurance faker caught RED handed!

You may or may not be aware but thousands of fake insurance claims take place in the UK each year. People fake accidents in order to claim insurance money for injuries they may or may not have. Without hard evidence it’s difficult to prove an accident was staged.

The below video captures a real incident that occurred during a RED driving lesson. It shows the awkward moment a man pretends that he has been run over, only to discover the car has an inbuilt camera which has recorded the whole thing. The man is seen walking across the road and directly into the back of a car which is reversing at less than 1mph (according to the inbuilt speedometer).

After throwing himself at the car and falling to the ground, he swears and screams. The driving instructor gets out of the car and informs him that the incident has been caught on camera which is when he realises the game’s up and legs it!

While amusing, this video and blog post highlight the scale and real problem of bogus insurance claims in the UK.

Fact file

• Accidents in the UK have shot up by 60% in less than a decade
• ‘Crash for Cash’ is an insurance scam currently happening all over the UK whereby people are staging accidents to claim insurance money from an injury
• 550,000 whiplash claims happen each year in the UK
• Insurance experts say half of these whiplash claims are believed to be fake
• If correct, this means at least half of the estimated £2billion a year paid out for whiplash claims is fraudulent, making it over a £1billion-a-year scam.

The top three most bizarre claims

1. Name: Paul Marshallsea (The Shark Wrestler)

Age: 62

From: Merthyr Tydfil, Wales

Claim: Paul was on sick leave from his job, when he was seen on the news wresting a shark whilst on holiday with his family in Australia.

Outcome: Although Paul was branded a hero in Australia, he was sacked from his job in the UK.

2. Name: John Darwin

Age: 63

From: Hartlepool

Claim: John faked his death in 2002 when he canoeing out to sea and never returned in order to have his mortgage paid off and receive life insurance money. After a large scale sea search his canoe was retrieved but he was not. John was in fact living in a bed sit next to the family home before the family moved to Cyprus in 2004 and then on to Panama in 2006. John decided to return to the UK in 2007 after being on the run for five years as a picture of him in Panama was released. He faked amnesia, pretending not to remember anything of the past five years.

Outcome: John was arrested and sentenced to six years and three months in prison

3. Name: Mohammed Gulzar

Age: 31

From: East London

Claim: Mohammed paid a coach driver to crash a coach full of his friends in to a car so that all the passengers could make bogus claims for fake injuries as a result of the accident. One passenger ran down the aisle, head-butted the windscreen and fell over whilst others rolled around screaming.

Outcome: Mohammed was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud insurance firms of £500,000 and has been jailed for four and a half years.