Fraud is prevalent and the companies spend huge amounts checking for this. Handlers will have a list of things to look for and others just crop up as the claim progresses.
Easily found ones tens to e altered or fake documents. In one instance we had a claim for a pair of glasses where the claim was inflated by adding a 2 to the front of a Ā£95 receipt. A phone call to the optician soon sorted that and the customer was more than surprised to et a call from the Police asking about the fraud. At a similar level we had a claim from a building site manager who had doctored an estimate for a door bought on site for a claim for a door for his house which looked high. The handler spotted that the estimate had been changed to show the claimants address.
One fraud that was difficult to spot was for a block of flats where the same carpet was being passed round various identical flats until the same adjuster was appointed and recognised it.
We have even had a claim for the same written off truck by the same operator. In that case the vehicle had an accident in France and was repatriated to avoid tax and the owner then took the salvage as spare parts. He then managed to make a second claim for the vehicle using a different registration over here, but was caught due to the unusual specification of the truck which needed some research and the damage was seen to be identical to the previous claim.
One blatant one was a fish and chip shop where they had a theft at night and the owner claimed they had cleaned him out. His books showed a normal days trading next day, with the purchase of only wet fish and a police report showing a report of a few bottles of soft drinks stolen.
One we believed to be fraudulent but could never prove was a fire in a business where the staff stayed behind one night to work overtime and sent out for fish and chips for themselves. The paper is alleged to have fallen onto an electric fire which set the paper alight and burned the place down. They were in financial difficulty and went bankrupt afterwards.
One long ago that possibly would not work now due to claims being more centralised, computers and office numbers reduced involved a Hasselblad camera owned by a South African. He had travelled from Edinburgh to London buying insurance for the camera at each town and city on the way down. He had bought the policy with us in Darlington and when he got there he was told the claims were dealt with in Leeds. He then turned up at our Leeds office with the camera completely flattened saying he had dropped it and a bus had run over it. The handlers first job was to ring a camera shop to check the value and the man on the other end said "that's funny I have just ad someone from the Eagle Star asking he same question. That started a line of enquiries with other companies and it was found several claims had been paid by other companies. He was never caught as he seemed to rumble the fact he had been caught out and never turned up to collect the payment, which was supposed to be collected from a Thomas Cook office in Bradford.
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