Auto Insurance Canada

According to CTV, auto insurance fraud has grown into a serious problem in Canada. Some car owners are looking for help in reporting fake car accidents to pull off their scams.

Dubbed as “doing accidents” this is a scam where a person is promised a substantial monetary sum to play a role in recruiting people to take part in insurance scams. Such recruits will act as passengers and pretend to be hurt in an accident.

Some groups will actually purchase junk cars from salvage cars and drive them long enough to get into an accident. Once they get into an accident, they will all claim injuries. Obviously, they will want to be compensated for their injuries and filing false claims with the insurance company is the way they seek to do this.

There are claims that even go so far as to file for reimbursements for stints in physical rehab facilities even though rehab never took place. Despite such outlandish behavior, such fraud schemes seemingly continue to perpetuate.

Does this seem like a minor problem carried out by only a few people? Actually, the scam is a wide scale one and there are over $10 million dollars in fraud claims filed in Canada annually. Clearly, this is not a small problem. The impact of such a problem on the nation’s auto insurers has been significant. Close to $1.3 billion dollars is paid out by auto insurers to cover fraud claims. The industry takes in $9 billion in premium payments so the money they pay out is fairly substantial (nearly 15%).

With greater crackdowns in the United States, Canada is facing an influx of fraud perpetrators. This problem may continue to grow unless definitive and direct action is properly undertaken by authorities.

As trends indicate, the amount of money being siphoned off for fraudulent claims is actually increasing as opposed to decreasing. With such information, one would assume that the authorities would be seeking to crack down on such behavior. Unfortunately, government policies may be contributing to such problems. Lack of oversight and limited legal investigation initiatives are all contributing to the growth of such fraud.