The last thing a normal driver would delight over is the next traffic accident. Not so insurance fraudsters, who plan their prangs with all the loving attention of a Hollywood director.
Dents and broken glass are the way they earn a living, and police in Germany’s smallest state, Bremen, recently estimated 10 per cent of all accidents in their domain were associated with some kind of fraud.Insurance companies say that figure is roughly right if you count in the folks who claim on unconnected damage, for example taking a hammer after an accident and smashing in all the other vehicle parts they would like replaced at the insurance company’s expense.Provoked accidents have developed into a full-scale business in Germany, creating a headache for both insurers and for the innocents who are lured into the trap and are made to blame.“These criminals usually exploit the carelessness of others to provoke an accident,” explains Klaus Brandestein, a spokesman for the GDV, Germany’s federation of insurance companies in Berlin. The range of tricks is huge.One is to wait in partly-obscured side streets and zoom out from the right when a motorist approaches. If the victim fails to yield the right of way in line with the road code, there is a collision.The victim’s insurer pays royally for the damage, the criminal does some rough and ready panelbeating and keeps the profit, and a few days later is lurking in another side street to try the same trick using the patched-up car.Others exploit the rule of the road that you must always be able to stop within the clear road ahead.Most drivers follow the car in front closer than is really safe, so criminals can provoke a prang just by slamming on the brakes.Often the routine is practised by cars in pairs. The first one to brake then speeds off, the second car is hit in the rear. Its driver can claim he was forced to brake by the rogue driver who vanished.“Over the past decade, the proportion of these frauds conducted by organized criminals has been growing fast,” said Christian Weishuber, a spokesman at Allianz, Europe’s biggest insurance company. “The professionals count their accidents in the thousands.”In the early days the accidents were mostly fender-benders on city streets, but some practitioners these days go for more dangerous stuff.“For years we thought these provoked accidents would never happen on the autobahns,” said Weishuber. They thought wrong.There have been cases of high-speed crashes in which fraudsters deliberately waved overtaking motorists into seeming gaps in the traffic, then sideswiped them as the two tried to proceed along the same lane.The fraudster denies afterwards having made any signal. Criminals who do this have little fear of being hurt themselves and do not care that others might end up in hospital or worse.“Faked accidents are mainly aimed at conning insurance companies,” said Rainer Hessel of the German road-safety organization Deutsche Verkehrswacht in Bonn. “But they are also a general road-safety issue.”Once you’ve survived a deliberate “accident”, other headaches start as you try to save your no-claims bonus. The onus is on the “culprit” to prove he was not driving dangerously and that something fishy was going on.Paul Kuhn, a legal adviser to the German national motoring organization ADAC, advises an immediate call to the police after any unexplained accident. Fraudsters get nervous when cops show up.Kuhn also advises a careful examination of the scene: check for example to see if warning signs have been deliberately hidden by large vehicles, or if a van that obscured the view of the sidestreet suddenly drives away.Other reasons to smell a rat are witnesses who appear from nowhere and insistently take the side of the other party. Check the other car carefully: if it has evidently been to the panel-beater very recently, that could be a sign it does a prang every other week.It is also important to tell the insurer early on if you suspect you have been set up.“Insurance companies have ways of finding out if certain vehicles or drivers have had more-frequent-than-usual involvement in accidents,” explained Kuhn. It is also a good idea to write up exactly what happened and list the precise damage.That takes care of fraudsters who claim for far more damage than was actually caused in the collision.The best protection is of course defensive driving: don’t follow too close, approach obscured intersections slowly. But in practice we cannot drive that way 100 per cent of the time.“Besides, every situation is different, and no advice can apply for everyone,” added Hessel. “However I would say, stay on your guard. Don’t assume that just because you’re in a quiet residential area you can cruise along without paying attention.“I’d go on alert for example if I was approaching a familiar intersection and something quite unfamiliar was blocking my field of view.”
