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HOME : Just the FAQs Ma'amExaggerating Your Insurance Claim Is A Crime!I've been faithfully paying my insurance premiums all these years and have never had a claim - until recently. My house was burglarized and my television and VCR were stolen. It will cost $1,000 to replace them, so I was planning to make a claim for that amount. But now I realize that I have a $500 deductible on my policy. That means I have to pay $500 of the claim, so I'll only get $500 from the insurance company - not enough to replace both items. Yet I've paid thousands of dollars in insurance premiums over the years, and it's not my fault I was robbed. Therefore, can I make a claim for $1,500 instead (and say something else was stolen), so I can get enough money from the insurance company to replace both of the stolen items? After all, that's what my insurance is for, isn't it? While you may think
the insurance company should cough up extra cash to pay for your TV and
VCR, exaggerating an insurance claim, as you propose to do, is not only a
bad idea - it's a crime. Too many otherwise
honest policyholders like you "pad" or exaggerate legitimate
claims in the mistaken notion that the insurance company "owes"
them more. Although they may not realize it, they are committing insurance
fraud, and it costs us all a bundle. While some cases of
insurance fraud will leave you shaking your head at the sheer stupidity -
like the guy who claimed that his leather jacket, which he said he stored
in the freezer to protect the leather, had been ruined when there was an
electrical failure in his neighbourhood - most will leave you shaking with
anger at the cost to honest policyholders. Many people think if
they cheat on an insurance claim, it's only the big insurance companies
who pay the price. In fact, we all do, in the form of higher premiums to
make up for the money that is lost to fraud. The Canadian Coalition
Against Insurance Fraud, an alliance consisting of representatives from
consumer groups, police chiefs, fire marshals, and insurance companies,
estimates that fraud costs as much as $1.3 billion in year in the property
and casualty sector (homeowners, automobile, and business insurance)
alone. That means that, for every dollar you pay for insurance, 10 to 15
cents go toward paying false claims. In other words, they cheat, and you
pay. While arson burns up
the most dollars in fraudulent claims, so-called "opportunistic"
crimes, like stretching the truth, account for the greatest number of
bogus claims. So leave the
exaggerating to the fishermen (we've all heard those fish stories!), and
claim for exactly what was stolen. |
