CAR INSURANCE NEWS ROUNDUP: WEEK ENDED 10 mar 2013:
If you’ve ever wondered why your commercial van insurance premium keeps going up every year, it turns out that we’re all being victimised by criminals.
Whether it’s the van insurance or car insurance industry, the prevalence of insurance fraud has reached epidemic proportions in the UK. In fact, a new report issued by the Association of British Insurers recently revealed that when it comes to claims costs, the money paid out on personal injury claims is by and large the biggest cost to insurance companies – and they turn around and charge you and me in order to make up the ever rising shortfall.
An absolutely huge proportion of these costs could be, in fact, originating from completely spurious claims, and nowhere is this more a possibility than when it comes to whiplash injury claims, as the injuries are notoriously hard to disprove. The ABI estimates that at least £90 of every driver’s insurance cover goes directly towards the costs of paying out all these fraudulent claims, and with some 1,500 claims rolling in to the nation’s insurance companies each and every day, any number of these could be completely fabricated by ‘crash for cash’ scammers looking to pull the wool over our eyes and get away with vast sums of cash.
And if you think it’s a victimless crime, think again: on top of the kinds of woe we all have to put up with in scraping together the cash to keep our van or car on the road every year, scammers that cause road traffic accidents can often cause massive real injuries to innocents. In fact, one poor woman lost her life thanks to one instance of fraud gone terribly wrong.
The incident occurred in Buckinghamshire on the A40 recently, where three men in a Ford Transit van purposefully got themselves into an accident by slamming on the brakes, sending the car behind them, 34 year old Balinder Kaur Gill’s Ford Fiesta, to shunt them from behind. The plan was to then make a claim to Ms Gill’s insurer for the vehicle damage and the ‘whiplash’ the three men suffered, but in a flash that all changed when Ms Gill’s vehicle was struck from behind in turn, this time by a Renault van that was traveling at speed, slamming into the Fiesta with such force that the woman was slain instantly – all because the three in the Ford Transit wanted to make some quick cash.
I simply can’t believe how reckless and selfish some people can be. Leave off with the cost in insurance that people like the men in the Ford Transit cause – the loss of life is absolutely reprehensible and I can only hope and pray that the Government does something about this serious whiplash fraud problem in order to prevent such tragedies in the future.
