Episode 1 Claimed and Shamed

Insurance fraud in the UK is reaching epidemic levels,

and it's costing us billions of pounds a year.

Deliberate crashes, bogus personal injury claims,

even fake deaths.

The fraudsters are risking more and more to make a quick killing.

And every year, it's adding up to £50 to your insurance bill.

Insurers are fighting back.

Armed with covert surveillance systems...

How they think they can get away with it, I don't know

when the evidence from the camera is so clear.

..sophisticated data analysis techniques...

This is connected to a bank account and a second mobile phone number.

..and a newly formed, dedicated police unit.

-Police, get back!

-..they're catching the criminals red handed.

All those conmen, scammers, cheats on the fiddle,

now they're caught in the act

and claimed and shamed.

Today, a whiplash claimant with an outlandish story.

She was arguing that she was in two places at once.

IFED raids a suspected fraud gang.

Open the door or it'll get smashed in.

And the Lancashire Police leave nothing to doubt.

You will be caught and you will be punished

and your assets will be stripped from you.

Gloucester, not a place you would associate with violent gang crime.

But on the 11th of August 2007,

38-year-old local, David Russell,

was found staggering near his home,

covered in blood and with seven nails buried in his body.

He'd been the victim of a violent and unprovoked attack.

He spun me around, grabbed hold of my,

bottom of my T-shirt with one hand

then pushed what I now know to be this orange nail gun

into my chest and basically fired off a number of cracks, I heard.

Two of the nails were buried in David Russell's forearm.

More worryingly another five had been pumped into his chest,

one lodged just an inch from his heart.

If it was further left or further down

it could have caused more of an injury, sort of thing.

The attackers had not been found,

DC Dean Morse was given the job of catching them.

Mr Russell's allegation obviously sent concerns through the community,

the last thing you want

is reports of a gang going around with a nail gun

and basically attacking people

and obviously shooting them with nails.

From his hospital bed,

David Russell expressed the fears held by the local community.

Could have been a little old dear or an old guy, you don't know.

If they can pick on a 30-odd-year-old bloke,

they'll pick on anybody, sort of thing.

So, at the end of the day, we just need to catch them, basically.

His plea was to have a dramatic effect on the investigation.

It attracted the attention of an old boss,

who had some interesting information about Mr Russell for the police.

On his CV, when he was employed by the company

he said that he had spent 18 years in the Royal Marines.

That he had done three tours of duty in Northern Ireland

and that he had also served in the Gulf War.

Some of which were complete lies,

so DC Morse did some research on the victim.

This then led me to making inquiries

with the Criminal Compensation Board.

Criminal injuries basically told me

that he had reported a crime in Avon and Somerset in 2004.

And to his astonishment DC Morse found

that in that incident David was the victim of an unmotivated attack.

The weapon - a nail gun.

The number of nails removed from his body - seven.

On that occasion his insurer paid out £4,400.

When you suddenly have a previous allegation

exactly the same number of nails

with a method of doing it basically that is exactly the same,

you know that you've got somebody there who is either

the unluckiest man in Britain or is a consummate liar.

We went to arrest Mr Russell,

and he broke down fairly quickly in interview

and fully admitted that he had made up both the stories

in Gloucester and down in Bristol.

David Russell appeared at Gloucester Crown court.

Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years imprisonment

for perverting the course of justice.

He was very remorseful as to his actions

and he has fully regretted what has taken place.

The IFB sends out a warning to repeat offenders.

We now have all the tools at our disposal

to be able to investigate and prosecute.

And a bus company faces a stubborn fraudster.

She, at great expense to the public purse,

decided that she was going to plead not guilty.

In the fight against the problem of insurance fraud,

an elite police squad have come together to form IFED,

the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department.

Insurance fraudsters are hitting us in our pockets. That's not right.

IFED have been set up to combat that problem

and we will do so by making arrests all over the country.

This dedicated team works tirelessly

to bang up the crooks and conmen

-getting rich off other people's money.

-Police! Step back!

Commit insurance fraud, there's every chance

that IFED are going to come knocking on your door

and bring you to justice.

Police! Don't move! Stay where you are!

By April 2012, after only six months of operating

it had already busted 80 fraudsters.

Adding up to £12 million of fraud under investigation.

Insurance fraud is seen, at the moment, as an easy touch.

IFED is setting out to stop that

and make these organised crime groups think again.

It's 5.40am and IFED is executing a multi-location raid

on the members of a suspected fraudulent accident management company.

These types of bogus outfits work by taking your car

and making it look as though it's been in a crash

with a second vehicle.

They will then pay you to take responsibility for the bogus crash.

Leaving them to make a large claim for the damage

to the second vehicle against your insurance company.

IFED has one team preparing to raid a place of business

and another at a residential address.

The team suspects that inside this flat lives a member

who may have been involved in the fraudulent activity.

THEY KNOCK ON DORR

Open the door or it's going to get smashed in!

Good lad.

With your safety in mind till we do some searching,

-we'll place some handcuffs on you OK?

-Yes, sure.

Just put your hands out for me.

Assisting IFED on the raid is the Tactical Aid Unit.

Having gained entry to the flat,

DS Mark Forster briefs them on the case.

He's introduced various people to this accident management company,

provided names, addresses for these claimants basically.

So any documentation in relation to names, addresses, you know,

written on scrap bits of paper.

We know that the accidents

that have been fraudulently submitted to the insurance companies

involve high-value vehicles and a lot of money is being made

by credit hire, in other words replacement vehicles,

some of which they're charging the insurance companies £300 a day for.

And these are vehicles that they've had for up to 18 months.

Lovely job.

Even before the team starts the search for fraudulent documents,

they come across some cannabis.

-Is that just all paraphernalia in there?

-Yeah, it is, yeah.

-They're going to bag up and take with them then.

-They found...

-Get a caution, yeah.

-Small amount, is it?

Yeah, well, an eighth, or something like that.

IFED came here for evidence of fraudulent activity.

In one of the bedrooms, a significant find is made.

A number of sim cards here.

I don't know, about a dozen or so sim cards, another three there.

Well, as I say, it's a common theme for criminals to use

more than one mobile phone and certainly more than one sort of sim card.

It sort of assists to cover their tracks etc, etc.

Assists with their criminality and basically it makes it

a lot more difficult for us to detect who they're contacting,

who's contacting them etc, etc.

DS Forster is called back to the lounge

by one of his officers tasked with analysing paperwork.

He suffered a fall from a ladder in 2005.

Sustained a heal fracture.

He had an MRI in 2007, revealed protrusion.

It's documentation that relates to a personal injury claim.

We're just looking to see whether it may form part of

a personal injury claim that may be fraudulent

or whether it is a legitimate claim.

The raid location has already filled a lot of evidence bags.

DS Forster suspects he has found a piece of criminal research.

It's a printed picture from Googlemaps, Streetview.

This the sort of thing we do come across quite often

with people who are involved in staged or contrived, accident claims.

The print-out contains a detailed description of the crash,

including dates, times and positioning of the cars.

So, and underneath that is says, "weather, damp, wet."

And then it says, "driver, male."

Two males, which were presumably passengers

or other occupants in that vehicle.

The suspect is arrested and the search for evidence is over.

This half of the double raid is complete.

Off we go.

The second IFED team executes the next phase of the raid.

You're under arrest, suspicion of conspiracy to defraud.

The UK is the whiplash capital of Europe.

Nearly 1,200-whiplash claims are made on our roads every day.

The cost to the NHS of treating whiplash

has been estimated at £8 million a year.

It's December 2008 and the W15 bus is winding its way

through the busy streets of Walthamstow, North East London.

Our driver was driving along a quite narrow and busy road in London.

There were cars parked on both sides,

quite difficult for him to get through.

Unfortunately, an error of judgement from the driver

resulted in the bus scraping a parked car.

The owner of the damaged car, Patricia Walker,

confronted the driver about the scrape.

Patricia Walker claimed she had been sitting in the car with her husband,

that the bus had hit the car and that she had suffered injuries.

She said that she suffered injuries to her neck

and that she was still struggling

with the symptoms four or five months later.

It was an unfortunate incident and Arriva was going to accept

full responsibility for the collision and the whiplash suffered by Mrs Walker,

that was until the bus driver's report was submitted.

Our driver had done a good job in completing the report form,

which he has to complete after every incident.

He made it quite clear there was only one person

in the vehicle which he had hit.

Before any kind of pay out could be arranged,

this difference of opinion had to be sorted.

So Arriva analysed the bus's on-board CCTV footage.

Our buses are fitted with high-definition CCTV cameras.

Forward facing, rear facing, internal cameras.

And when they analysed the footage,

the bus company didn't like what they saw.

Mrs Walker wasn't in the car at the time of the collision.

She was in fact crossing the road behind the bus.

The footage shows her knocking on the bus's back window

after witnessing the crash.

Unfortunately for Patricia Walker, it showed her not

actually inside the vehicle as she claimed in her claim form.

And when the bus actually passed her,

Patricia Walker then walks behind the bus,

you then you see her looking down the side of the bus

at the damage to her vehicle,

and then entering the bus and talking to the bus driver.

A fair cop, surely? But not in Patricia's eyes.

When we showed Patricia Walker the footage she looked shocked.

And her basic answer was quite simply

"I know how it looks, Officer, that is me on the footage.

"I cannot explain it,

"but I was inside the vehicle at the time of the collision."

So effectively she was arguing that she was in two places at once.

The police and we thought that she would plead guilty

and go away quietly

with whichever sentence the court thought appropriate.

But no, she at great expense to the public purse,

decided that she was going to plead not guilty.

Mrs Walker seemed to think that the jury

might believe that she could be in two places at once.

Not surprisingly the jury did not believe her.

Patricia Walker was charged with fraud by false representation.

The jury found her guilty.

And on the 27th May 2011, she was sentenced

to 12 months community service and a three month curfew.

I think that she just made a wrong decision on this occasion

and why she pleaded not guilty I have no idea,

but I think she's regretted that decision.

I think she was lucky not to go to prison.

For us, CCTV cameras are worth their weight in gold.

We want a clear message of deterrence to go out to people

that if you are involved in an accident with an Arriva bus

and it's our fault and you are genuinely injured

then we want to pay you fairly and quickly.

But if you're not injured and you're out to make a quick buck

then we'll do all we can to take criminal action against you.

The British Isles is frequently pummelled by storms

blown in from the Atlantic.

Tellingly, in this country,

the second most common type of building insurance claim is for storm damage.

Meet Munsif Dad, and his two sons Amir and Nadeem.

It's November 2005 and they've just submitted a £1,430 claim

for repairs to the storm-damaged roof of a terraced property they own

in their hometown of Nelson, Lancashire.

That same month, the Dad family has also submitted a second claim

for storm damage to the roof of a second property they own nearby.

The Dads received payouts from the insurance company for both claims.

Seven months later in June 2006,

in what seems to be an incredible stroke of bad luck,

one of the houses again suffers storm damage to the roof.

As before, the Dads submit a claim for the damage

and wait for the money to come in.

But 170 miles away in London something was happening

that would stop the Dads from receiving a penny from their insurers.

The formation of the Insurance Fraud Bureau, the IFB.

The IFB was set up to combat organised insurance crime in the UK.

By persuading a previously secretive insurance industry to share information,

the IFB has become a very powerful weapon

in the fight against insurance fraud.

The IFB had barely reached its first birthday

when they were approached by an insurer with suspicions

about a number of claims coming from the small town of Nelson.

Among them, were the Dads' claims for storm-damaged roofs.

The insurer first became suspicious with the claims in Operation Flash

because a number of the cases were close to policy inceptions

and the circumstances of the claims were remarkably similar to one another.

In order to learn more about Mr Dad,

the IFB put his details through their specialist software.

The software has access to information

from nearly every insurer in the country.

Armed with just the name and address of just a single policy holder,

the software can create a map of that individual's insurance agreements.

It's a very quick process.

I can start by showing you

what a genuine person in our system might look like.

The average policy holder would have a simple map

with just a few connections raising no suspicion from the IFB.

Here's an example of one of the properties in Operation Flash.

This property in the middle was an address that was owned by Amir Dad.

In less than two years, he submitted nine claims

and each of these icons highlighted in red

represents a claim against one of the insurance companies that we worked with.

The software indicated that Mr Dad was suspiciously well-insured,

so the IFB took the case back up to Lancashire to get extra help.

Leading the investigation for the Lancashire Police

was DI Dave Groombridge.

He and his team recognised a pattern in the claims

being made by the Dads.

I think the offenders in this case were clever

in keeping their individual claims down to a minimum.

So it was volume claims, which netted a huge amount of money collectively

rather than just one or two small big claims.

DI Dave Groombridge and his team unearthed a total

of £104,000-worth of claims made by the Dads.

The Lancashire team also discovered

the Dads had not restricted their scamming to just home insurance.

There was a number of claims which were quite outlandish.

Principally dogs that didn't exist, never had existed,

after two or three premium payments these dogs were miraculously either lost or stolen.

There was also large amounts of jewellery,

apparently stolen in burglaries which indeed later turned up

in the possession of the claimants, a complete false claim.

After two years of investigating, the IFB and Lancashire Police

had collected indisputable evidence of fraudulent activity by the Dads.

The most astonishing information being the schedule of works

carried out on the Dads' two properties.

2004, storm damaged roof at house number one.

September 2005, rear wall damaged by vehicle at house two.

October 2005, wall damaged at house one.

November 2005, roof damaged at house one and two!

March 2006, wall damaged at house one.

April 2006, roof damaged at house one.

May 2006, wall damaged at house one.

June 2006, wall damaged at house one and two!

June 2006, roof damaged at house two.

The Lancashire Police were ready to strike.

The main conspirators, the main people behind this scam,

were arrested in September 2009 by Lancashire Police.

They executed warrants at a number of addresses

supported by staff from the IFB.

A judge at Preston Crown Court

called it a clever and determined fraud.

Mr Munsif Dad was handed a suspended nine-month prison sentence.

His sons Nadeem and Amir were each imprisoned for 15 months.

I think their criminal activities dominated their lives

and a vast majority of the trappings of their wealth

had come about through their criminal behaviour.

We pay increased insurance premiums to cover the losses incurred

by the companies through this sort of fraud.

But times are changing and the police

are prepared to work with other agencies and collectively

we will pursue these people and be under no misapprehension, you will be caught

and you will be punished, and your assets will be stripped from you.

Today, IFED is executing raids on a suspected motor fraud gang.

Open the door or it's going to get smashed in!

Alongside the arrest of a suspect earlier,

the second IFED team continues to search two further properties.

A large search is planned at a business address

where they hope to secure more evidence.

First, IFED heads to the home of another suspect.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-We're from the City of London Police.

-From what?

-We're from the police.

-Yeah?

-Yes. Can we come in, please?

-Yes, course you can.

You are under arrest, OK? On suspicion of conspiracy to defraud.

For what?

You don't have to say anything, but it may harm your defence

if you do mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.

Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

Do you understand?

-Yes.

-Yes.

The suspect works for the accident management company

and they believe is involved in the alleged fraudulent activity there.

DC Declan Malowe searches the flat for evidence of fraud.

It shouldn't be too long once we've finished searching,

we'll then take you to the custody suite

and then at some point later on today you'll be interviewed.

This is the lady's main bedroom.

The other bedroom's been searched and nothing's been found,

so this is the last room to do in the flat.

DC Malowe takes some paper work for further investigation.

With a second suspect arrested,

IFED has just one more location to raid.

We've just heard news from DS Finnegan

that we've got access to another premises

so we're just waiting for further update from him

to see if he needs additional resources there when we've finished.

With a 1,000-square metre business to search,

the IFED team based here will need plenty of help.

Leading the search is DS Tom Finnegan

who's just been made aware of the recent arrests.

We intend to carry out a search of her office very shortly,

as I said there are other

locked offices in there that are the offices of the directors.

We intend to affect entry to those offices shortly

and we'll see what comes out of that search.

There's plenty of security protecting this workplace,

but IFED is used to such measures

and has come armed with a crow bar and a battering ram.

It's not just about brute force though.

Today, DS Finnegan's IFED unit is comprised

of specialist investigators,

brought in anticipation of complex evidence.

My colleague here is specially trained to interrogate computers,

laptops, anything of digital electronic nature.

We have dedicated financial investigators

and this gentleman is one of those investigators.

He's here specifically to look at the financial documents

in relation to the company.

Looking at an intimidating workload,

DS Finnegan calls in the help of DC Malowe and DI Rogers.

Right, the sort of things that we'll be looking for

are these sort of files which say "referrals",

and within those we'd expect to find documentation of people

that have allegedly been involved in accidents

and the subsequent claims that have then transpired from those accidents

Every scrap of evidence is needed

if the IFED team is to get a conviction and it's mounting up.

This is an office which we're interested in searching.

We'd expect to see whiteboards on the wall,

indicating the work that they're currently involved in.

And we would think that these are the names

likely of people involved in staged accidents that haven't occurred.

The financial investigator makes a discovery.

So far, we can see large sums of money

going through their business account which might be all legitimate,

but at this stage it's certainly of interest to us.

DS Finnegan's IT specialist is extracting large amounts

of potential evidence from the computers.

What my colleague is doing this time is taking an image,

a forensic image of that server which we can use at a later date,

examine it for any evidence that might be on it

and obviously then it can be prepared as an exhibit for the case.

All in, IFED spends over 50 man hours

extracting, deciphering and bagging evidence on site.

It's been a successful raid,

IFED has enough evidence to fill a van.

Making DS Finnegan a happy man.

We believe this particular accident claim company

has been responsible for putting a large number of fraudulent claims

forward to the insurance industries.

That, of course, when they turn out to be fraudulent

and the insurance industry spend that money, or pay that money out,

results in you and I, and all members of the British public,

paying more for their insurance.

We, at the end of the day,

are covering in our premiums the cost of fraud that has been committed.

The owners of the accident management company were also arrested,

and along with the two suspects arrested in the IFED raids,

are all now on bail.

If charged with conspiracy to defraud and found guilty

all four could be facing ten years in prison.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd