Georgia Insurance

Some morning, residents of Lawrence, Mass., have awakened to see the beginning of a car jutting above the surface of the Merrimack River. On inspection, police found the divers, and many people dumping their cars into the river on the file incorrect stolen car claims that the last car on the night before, he had risen to a battery on the other and would not decrease.

Lawrence is an example of what auto insurance fraud was widespread and increasingly evident in many parts of the USA: The regulatory authorities and researchers say that fraud is now widespread and more dear to the nation that the insurance industry believes that the industry is relatively little done to oppose him. A difference in the estimates

Critics say the fraud was an important force in pushing the Americans have to pay premiums for auto insurance, $ 40 billion to 100 billion dollars since 1980 and that fraudulent claims - all from reports of accidents, which happen that excess cars Damage false injuries - were paid with little challenge or investigation.

In Massachusetts, Insurance Commissioner believes that fraud and abuse as much as 40 percent of automobile insurance claims and a recent study shows that nearly 90 per cent of the rights of the injury suffered by Lawrence participates in fraud or serious abuses.

The insurance industry has long been a fraud estimated at 10 per cent of claims automatically connected.

In New York, Nassau County police have shown that 50 to 60 per cent of hundreds of people, their cars stolen in the Green Acres Shopping Mall in Valley Stream, LI, effectively abandoned or destroyed for the insurance sector money, Lieut. Mulvey, “said Lawrence. One of four reports buyers of stolen cars, he was arrested because of fraud, he said, and as many as seven out of ten people come close to such reports with inner courtyard - doctors, teachers, even a corrections officer — Wind-up stopped.

“Ordinary people and say things like:” Hey, they stole my car was that while I was shopping at Macy’s “- the only problem is that there is no Macy’s,” said Lieutenant Mulvey .

Insurance companies rarely have lost a lot of money from fraud, because critics say they could often at the expense of the public in the form of higher premiums. The companies deny.

“I would say that the insurance industry quotient of excitement to the pursuit of fraud on a scale of one to ten is less,” said Tim Ryles, the commissioner of insurance for Georgia and chairman of the committee the fight against fraud of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “I think there are many surface of frenetic activity, but not much activity to do something to be done.”

Major insurance companies bitter dispute such criticism. They strengthen their attention on fraud, they say, but they are constrained by the cost of investigations and the threat of prosecution if they refuse to pay legitimate claims promptly. They also argue that prosecutors and criminal prosecution authorities, often faced with more pressure on crimes of violence, lack of genuine interest in the fight against fraud. Only eight countries have departments of insurance fraud office.

In addition, the public can not wait for private insurance companies to solve the problem of fraud, they say, if the fraud seems as much the public.

“The insurance sector is thus much as they can,” said Wilhelm Schroeder, a vice-chairman of the Alliance of American Insurers, an association of 170 claims and accidents. “We are a sector already under headquarters. ” Lax implementation that attracts the public

For what reasons whatsoever, the number of cases, insurance companies within the meaning of industry, the Agency reviews and supports fraud, the police authorities, the assurance of the Institute for Prevention of the crime, were less than one-fiftieth of 1 percent of over 50 million auto insurance claims in the USA during the year 1991. The Institute has reviewed 1616 cases and 770 investigations have resulted in arrests.