Car Insurance Fraud

<div align="left">The link between fraud and organised crime is revealed by the example of a drugs gang in a big English city.<br />The people that we are finding and identifying at the heart of these particular frauds aren’t just working alongside the drug engineer insurance liability professional<br />, they are the drug traffickers<br />Chris Hill, Norwich Union<br />The criminals have contrived hundreds of car accidents in which they lured members of the public to crash into the gang’s cars.<br />“The scale of this operation is enormous,” Chris Hill said.<br /><br />“This gang had induced more than 400 accidents in the course of a year.<br />“Witnesses appear out of nowhere and they typically target women or the elderly because it’s easier to get an admission of liability on the spot from them.<br /><br />What follows is a claim both for themselves and frequently for fictitious passengers, for personal injury against the innocent party’s insurer.<br />“The people that we are finding and identifying at the heart of these particular frauds aren’t just working alongside the drug traffickers, they are the drug traffickers” Mr Hill said.<br />What is going wrong?<br />Norwich Union’s research reveals a deep frustration at the inability - and sometimes unwillingness - of the police to take action.<br />The Norwich Union says it struggles to get any of its cases prosecuted, despite often providing masses of evidence, investigated by lawyers, and served up to the police as a complete case.<br />As a result, fraudsters are getting away with their crimes, commercial insurance liability themselves and coming back a second and third time for more.<br />According to the insurer, this situation is mainly because fraud is the one major crime for which the government does not set police targets.<br />So police forces - with the exception of the City of London force and the Metropolitan Police - simply don’t devote enough money and resources to dealing with it.<br />Last year the Norwich Union detected 4,000 clear cut cases of fraud against itself.<br />But because of low take-up rates by the police it presented the authorities with only 41 of these cases - so called “super-frauds” involving significant public interest or organised crime.<br />Of these cases, only 18 were taken to court, although all the prosecutions were in fact successful.<br />But even then, fewer than half of these cases led to prison sentences.<br />Norwich Union says that most UK insurance firms, and many banks, now simply don’t bother to report most of the frauds they discover.<br />This lack of effective penalties is one reason, Mr Hill says, why fraudsters persist with their schemes.<br />The problem is the hundreds of millions of pounds that are being salted away which is being used to finance other forms of criminality<br />The clearest problem is that if fraudsters do get caught they usually get to keep their money.<br />To stop fraud being low risk and high reward, the authorities must establish the principle that the fraudsters pay back their stolen money, Norwich Union argues.<br />“We have to get away from the idea that people can serve their time, fly off to an island in the Pacific and live the life of reilly,” Mr Hill said.<br />“Where we get those convictions the financial debt should stay with them, and we should recover the money in a more consistent and aggressive way.”<br />The criminal revenues being salted away can then be recycled into fresh criminality - or simply taken as profits.<br />The government has made recapturing the proceeds of crime a priority, and created new powers with the 2002 Proceeds of Crime Act.<br />The act is widely appreciated by police economic crime investigators - but its use remains patchy, as a 2004 HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report showed.<br /><br /></div>

Car Insurance Fraud

The link between fraud and organised crime is revealed by the example of a drugs gang in a big English city. The people that we are finding ...

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