Episode 2 Claimed and Shamed

Insurance fraud in the UK has hit epidemic levels.

It's costing us over £2 billion every year.

That's almost £6 million every day.

Deliberate crashes, bogus personal injuries, even phantom pets -

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

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

But insurers are fighting back, exposing 15 fake claims every hour.

Armed with covert surveillance systems...

There's the subject out the vehicle.

..sophisticated data analysis techniques...

-..and a highly skilled and dedicated police unit...

-Police! Don't move!

-Stay where you are!

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

Just don't lie to us.

All those conmen, scammers and cheats on the fiddle are now

caught in the act, and claimed and shamed.

Coming up: A fraudulent cyclist takes his claim up a gear...

All in all,

we estimated that he would be seeking around £3 million in damages.

Stop, look and listen. This woman certainly didn't.

Suddenly, a large object has struck you, you've fallen down,

you see your life flashing before your eyes.

And the police's Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department is out

to catch some bad guys.

You still get quite a buzz when you're

sort of knocking on somebody's door and taking out the baddies.

Life goes in cycles.

Well, it certainly does for the 13 million people in the UK who

regularly get on their bikes.

But accidents do happen,

and it's often the cyclist that comes off a lot worse.

And in August 2008, Majid Khan was no exception.

Mr Khan was cycling to work early one morning and a vehicle,

which was insured by ourselves, actually had a collision with him.

And Mr Khan was actually very seriously injured.

He had fractures of various vertebrae,

multiple rib fractures and lacerations to his liver.

He also had a brain haemorrhage and skull fractures.

He was in hospital for around a month.

Insurance payouts on serious cycling accidents like this can be massive.

And there was no doubt that Majid Khan would need financial help.

An accident like this, for us, it's more about how long it takes

to recover and how full the recovery actually is.

Although Majid Khan had been severely

injured in the accident. Nine months later, he made what was

thought to be a full recovery and even returned back to work.

Everything was proceeding pretty normally as a claim.

We were investigating it, we were working with his lawyers.

We offered Majid Khan £75,000 in damages

and that offer was initially rejected.

With the cash offer refused and what appeared to be a full recovery, the

insurers and solicitors thought Mr Khan had simply got

back on his bike and got on with life.

But six months later, that all changed

when Majid Khan's father-in-law got in touch.

He seemed to have a complete relapse. He could only recognise his wife.

He was struggling with day-to-day activities.

He was unable to walk down the road unaided.

We were told that Mr Khan wasn't allowed out of the house

on his own because his family feared that he would just wander aimlessly.

He had no sense of danger

and so he wouldn't have been able to cross roads safely.

We were also told that he had no concept of money

so he wouldn't be able to go to the shop and purchase an item.

He wouldn't be able to check the change.

He'd forgotten how to do basic tasks like using a mobile telephone.

What they were alleging was that he was so severely disabled

by these injuries that he would need 24-hour care and supervision.

And they were alleging that would go on for the rest of his life.

Around-the-clock care would cost millions - £3 million, to be exact.

That's how much Mr Khan's family claimed

they needed to look after him. But it just didn't add up.

We knew that this was a man who had returned to work,

and all of a sudden, we were being told that he couldn't work

and would never work and that he was severely disabled.

With suspicions high,

the insurance company decided to employ its best

tactic in suspected fraudulent claims - surveillance footage.

Sometimes, with surveillance, you don't believe that the person

you're seeing is the claimant in this action.

The footage was shocking, to say the least.

You can sum up the CCTV footage very easily as everything that he

claimed he couldn't do the CCTV showed us that he could do.

The medical experts had been told that Majid Khan didn't smoke.

He was seen to smoke quite a few cigarettes.

They were told that he wasn't permitted

out of the house on his own, yet we saw him out,

apparently running errands and, in some cases,

looking after small children.

That he wouldn't be capable of shopping for himself

and that he had no concept of money,

yet we see him going into the local shop.

That he had forgotten how to do basic tasks,

such as using a mobile telephone, yet he's seen having quite

a long conversation with somebody on a phone.

They'd been told that he couldn't communicate with anybody,

and again, he's seen out conversing and laughing with others.

The Majid Khan on the surveillance footage was

so unrecognisable from the one described on the insurance

claim that even the solicitors had to double-check.

We sent it to the expert who had examined Majid Khan on our behalf

during the claim and it was only once

he confirmed that he recognised the man in the footage

as the claimant that we were then able to think about disclosing it.

To add insult to injury, the investigation also uncovered

payslips which showed Majid Khan was in full-time employment.

We looked at some of his payslips and he was working full-time.

In fact, he was working overtime.

He'd been peddling so many lies, the case was taken to court.

The judge said that it had been a relatively sophisticated fraud,

that it was a grotesque exaggeration

and that everything Majid Khan had done had been a pack of lies.

Majid Khan and his father-in-law were both banged up for nine months.

We now have a family who has been split up because of their own greed.

The grandfather is in prison, the father is in prison and the

mother is now at home, trying to cope with a young child on her own.

Unlike some unscrupulous fraudsters,

Mr Khan had genuinely suffered life-threatening injuries

and was eventually paid £75,000 compensation.

Mr Khan absolutely was injured and we paid the amount of money which

we believe covered him for those injuries.

The whole issue here is that he took a case where

he was injured and then tried to make millions of pounds out of it.

From an original offer of £75,000 for his cycling accident,

Majid Khan had pumped up his claim to 3 million.

But he was left deflated when he received nine months behind bars.

Once that lie had been struck, he stuck with that lie.

Unfortunately, Mr Khan is now in jail

and will have nine months to contemplate that issue.

Majid Khan won't now receive the proper compensation

to which he was entitled because nobody knows what the

effects of the accident truly were on his life.

Coming up: A 15-ton bus gets pushy...

Suddenly, a large object has struck you, you've fallen down,

you see your life flashing before your eyes.

..and an insurance company takes a crash-for-cash criminal

to the cleaners.

The evidence was so overwhelmingly strong,

we felt it right to make an example of Mr Singh.

The Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department, or IFED for short,

is an insurance scammer's worst nightmare.

There is a dedicated 40-strong unit that works 24/7,

hunting down insurance fraudsters.

The team was set up over two years ago to crack down on insurance

crime in the UK.

Is there anything here that shouldn't be here that we're

going to find?

In that time, it's made over 450 arrests

and seen around 200 prosecutions.

If it's a fraud, it's in insurance, then it may well come to

IFED's attention, and IFED will take the necessary action.

Police officers! Can you come to the door, please?

Unscrupulous fraudsters will stop at nothing in their lust for cash.

And with street crime on the increase,

why would anyone question a woman who appears to be the unlucky

victim of a series of muggings?

Mugging can be a terrifying experience,

especially for someone who's a vulnerable victim, like a young lady.

It can have a traumatic effect on the person that suffered it.

In February 2012,

Anita Debnath claimed she was mugged in Trafalgar Square.

With over 15 million visitors to the capital every year,

it was an unlucky but not necessarily unusual crime to

be a victim of, and she immediately reported it to the police.

She's lost various items, all high-value,

all top-of-the-range smartphones, top-of-the-range designer bags,

top-of-the-range purses.

A month later, she was mugged again on a trip to Leeds.

Apparently a mugger's magnet, her run of bad luck didn't end

there as she was a victim again three months later in Dublin...

..and then again in Kingston upon Thames.

On each occasion, she claimed her handbag had contained more

electrical gadgets than MI5!

But four flyby fleecings just didn't add up.

I would say you're very unlucky if you've been mugged once in a year.

To be mugged four times in a year in four different

locations in two different countries is almost an impossibility.

Anita Debnath thought that if she played the victim, insurance

companies would take pity on her and simply hand over £50,000 in claims.

Anita Debnath invented the muggings to generate some sort of...

maybe some sympathy with the insurer and also the hope that they

wouldn't drill too deep into that particular offence.

I think, had she said she'd lost her purse on the bus

or on the underground, it may have got a different response to

saying that she'd actually been robbed in the street.

I think that was her way of thinking that she would get an easier ride.

The real mugger, in this case, was Anita.

She claimed from 11 different insurance companies for her

made-up muggings.

She obviously felt that she would get the cheque sent through to

her at the relevant time, once her claim had been settled.

Unfortunately for her,

she was wrong because the insurers were sharing information.

A pattern of offending emerged and it was that sheer volume that

brought it to the attention of the insurers.

And by reporting the fake crimes to help bolster her claims,

Anita Debnath had also robbed the police of their time.

I take a particularly dim view of the way Anita Debnath's operated.

Street robbery and mugging is a serious offence, which would

have been treated accordingly by the relevant police force.

She's quite happy to waste their time.

Officers would have been allocated to investigate that robbery

that never occurred.

Anita Debnath had travelled round Britain and Ireland,

carrying out what she thought was a mugging masterpiece.

But her final destination was the Old Bailey.

There were 12 charges of fraud by false representation,

to which she pleaded guilty to each one, and the judge sentenced

her to two years, three months' custodial sentence.

Anita Debnath thought she could mug the insurers of £50,000

but she was the real loser, and for her lies and deception,

she ended up with a long stretch behind bars.

I'm pleased with this particular sentence cos

I believe it sends out a message that insurance fraud isn't

a victimless crime and it also isn't a crime without consequence.

A vital part of IFED's work is the early-morning raid.

The element of surprise is a powerful weapon, which enables

officers to seize crucial evidence before it's destroyed.

For Detective Constable Kate Sibley,

it's the highlight of months of investigation.

You still get quite a buzz when you're knocking on somebody's door

and taking out the baddies.

But then I think it's good that we do have a bit of adrenaline pumping

cos you don't know what's going to happen when they open that door.

This morning, Kate is on a double raid.

Her colleague, DS Mark Forster, is driving to the other location as

part of a joint investigation into a suspected crash-for-cash claim.

The actual collision has been staged.

Effectively, one car has been driven into another car.

They've all submitted claims for the damage of the vehicle,

recovery costs and also personal injury.

As this is a multiple raid...

..it's essential that both teams go in at the same time.

-Can we come in and speak to your son, please?

-Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Good morning. Police officers from the City of London Police.

Are they here?

Where are they?

Gone out to work? Can we come in?

We've got a warrant to enter and search the premises.

IFED never take anything at face value,

so Kate decides to look for the suspects herself.

OK. Where...

They're upstairs? I did ask you that when I came in.

-Did you?

-Yup.

At the other property,

Mark has also found the suspect at home with his family.

Right, take a seat for me, please, mate.

Just listen to what I'm going to say to you, all right?

Listen carefully cos it is important, all right?

I'm arresting you on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud.

You conspired with others in order to submit a fraudulent

insurance claim in relation to a vehicle collision.

We have a warrant to enter and search these premises as well,

so we've searched your bedrooms.

They might be investigating fraud, but they still have to tread

carefully when it comes to house rules.

Can we take our shoes off before we go upstairs?

Upstairs, Kate's looking for any computer equipment that may have

been used in the alleged fraud.

I'm seizing a laptop that I've found and a mobile phone so far,

but I've still got all this to do.

The phones will be downloaded to see...

To get a list of all the phone numbers and calls.

We'll get a list of all the calls that have been made to see

if we can link them up to the other suspects that have been arrested.

And with the computer, that will be downloaded,

so hopefully, there'll be documentation or

e-mails on there in relation to the claims that have been made.

At the other location,

Mark also needs to seize any electrical devices.

-You've got a mobile phone?

-Yeah.

-Where's that? In your room?

-You've got it there?

-Yeah.

Whilst the phones are important, IFED is also looking for any

paperwork that may show any fraudulent activity.

We found some documentation in relation to another accident

claim already. It's not an accident that we're aware of at the moment.

We need to clarify exactly who's involved in that claim

and the nature of it, but we can obviously do checks with

insurance companies to find out a little bit more about that.

It appears that there's at least two more here, in this bedroom.

I found details of a further claim. May well be legitimate.

But it's something we need to look into.

It's certainly stuff that we're interested in at the moment.

We'll take it away.

It's essential that nothing is touched by the family as IFED

conducts its search.

Excuse me, can I just ask you to leave that there for me, please?

-Really?

-Yeah, please. You can stand and watch me. I'm not going to...

But I just don't want you to sort of interfere

with my things before I've had a look at them.

Any unusually expensive insurance documents are also seized.

This particular insurance quotation we've got here is in relation

to when the guy downstairs purchased them.

And his insurance, just for one year, was in excess of £1,000.

By anyone's standards, paying out over £1,000,

just for an insurance premium, seems quite excessive.

It seems the paperwork in the house is raising a number of questions.

We've got two separate letters here which are addressed to this

particular address. However, they're in a different name.

And the name...

The male's name listed on both of these two letters,

as far as we're aware, doesn't reside here.

But we'll obviously take these away, make some more inquiries

and interview the suspect downstairs as to who this particular

individual is.

At the other property, DC Tom Hill is assisting Kate in the search.

No cupboard is left untouched.

This is all stuff in the suspect's name so, obviously,

I'm searching a bit more closely through it all.

This is not his bedroom but he seems to use this maybe to

store his documents.

With all the evidence seized, bagged and removed from the property,

-Kate reflects on the morning's results.

-We've done a search.

We've seized computers, thumb drives, mobile telephones,

the stuff we wanted to seize.

And then we'll get that downloaded and examined and hopefully,

we'll get some evidence off that. And now they've been arrested,

they're going back to the police station where we'll interview them

and they'll probably be bailed later on today.

At the second location, Mark and his team have also called it a day.

Yeah, it's been a success.

We've got the four people that we've come out to get,

all been arrested, all now in custody.

What we often find is where there's one claim, there are numerous,

previous claims, and that certainly seems to be the case

searching this address, so a number of inquiries to be done on those.

-Yeah, it's been a success.

-The case is still under investigation.

FirstGroup transports over 2 million passengers every day.

Each double-decker weighs in at a whopping 15 tonnes of steel.

Not something you really want to have a run-in with.

But if you are bashed by a bus,

your case may well end up on Lee Ingram's desk.

The lady alleged that she was walking along the path,

she's looked to the left, looked to the right.

There's nothing coming so she's decided to cross the road.

As she's decided to cross the road, a bus has come out of nowhere,

struck her. According to her, she was thrown to the pavement very hard.

Her bag and her contents hit the floor and spilled everywhere.

Even though the bus was travelling at low speed,

the impact shocked the passengers on board.

She described being hit so hard that she thought she was finished.

Suddenly, a large object has struck you, you've fallen down,

you see your life flashing before your eyes

and it's a terrifying ordeal for anyone to have gone through.

To add insult to injury, in her moment of need,

the woman claims she was left abandoned at the roadside.

She's alleging that no-one offered her any help,

she couldn't get home, she didn't have any taxi fare.

The fact that no-one offered her assistance or even offered to

call her an ambulance, get her off the floor, yeah,

a very sad indictment of society nowadays.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining,

and this woman thought it came in the form of an insurance payout.

The lady claimed for physical and mental injuries.

She's also claiming that she was unable to look after her

children because of this accident, therefore

her husband had to take two weeks off work, no wages coming in,

couldn't pay her rent, couldn't pay her bills.

Some people will exaggerate their claims of illness.

Some even tell the odd fib about them.

So Lee always has a look at the CCTV footage before he reaches

for his cheque book.

When I first looked at the CCTV footage, you can

see that the bus has impacted with the woman.

It's definitely not the front of the bus, more to the side.

The average bus has twice as many eyes as a spider,

so Lee sets about looking at all 16 cameras to find out just how

badly knocked the woman was.

When you look at the second camera,

it shows that the incident isn't as serious as she described.

She hasn't actually fallen over at all.

-It was her handbag that's actually hit the floor.

-Hold on!

Let's have a look at that again.

She has amazingly been hit by a bus and stayed on her feet.

The woman thought she was on a ticket to ride, but the only

part of her that was left sprawled on the floor was her handbag.

And was she really left stranded by the side of the road?

When we reviewed all of our evidence, including the CCTV footage,

we were quite happy that the circumstances

she described just weren't right, so we then wrote to her,

explaining what had really happened in the incident, which she

must have known, whether she'd hit the ground or not.

We subsequently said we were not going to be paying her claim,

and she has now gone away.

So basically, she walked away with just a nasty scuff to her handbag.

With insurance fraud reaching critically high levels,

the Insurance Fraud Bureau was created eight years ago to clamp

down on organised insurance fraud and protect innocent customers.

We essentially collate all the data from the industry

and we help find the large-scale networks of organised fraud

that individual insurers can't spot themselves.

Its biggest headache is crash-for-cash cases,

where scammers either cause accidents or just pretend

they've been involved in one.

And more often than not,

it isn't just the insurance companies who are the victims.

Crash-for-cash is a dangerous type of fraud.

These people are taking vehicles out onto the road

and they're essentially using them as weapons because they're driving

one car into a collision with another and often at quite high speed.

We know that can lead to injuries and ultimately,

we know it's led to at least one fatality.

With around 70,000 personal injury claims linked to crash-for-cash,

insurers like LV are always suspicious when these

types of claims are made, just like the one from Mr Michael Singh.

It was alleged that the claimant was driving along a main road

when our policyholder came out of a side road into his path

and a collision occurred, injuring not just

the occupants in his vehicle but also occupants in our vehicle.

Multiple whiplash injuries, an awful lot of expense in terms

of vehicle damage, totalling in excess of £100,000.

With a six-figure settlement

and seven different claims of personal injury,

LV were becoming increasingly suspicious of the alleged accident.

We realised that this particular claim was being managed

through a claims management company that was well known to us

for providing fraudulent claims.

Incredibly, some people will damage their own car to make it

look like an accident.

And after a forensic engineer had looked at Mr Singh's car,

it was obvious there was no side-on smash.

What it was consistent was to a raking impact,

potentially down the side of a wall,

which alerted our suspicions to the fact that this car could easily have

been deliberately damaged to portray having been involved in an accident.

There was also no police report

and the insurance policy had been taken out just

days before the smash, so LV decided they weren't going to pay out.

However, he didn't let it lie

and decided to pursue the claim further

and with the help of his lawyers, issued proceedings against our

customer for his injuries and the damage to his vehicle.

Mr Singh had more front than Blackpool!

Not happy that his fraudulent claim had been turned down,

he decided to take LV to court for the money.

With such strong evidence in the insurer's favour,

the case was thrown out, but LV didn't want to leave it there.

On this occasion, the evidence was so overwhelmingly strong,

we felt it right to make an example of Mr Singh, not just to him

and his relatives and those involved in the accident management

company, but also to the wider population.

So we decided to bring our own proceedings through the civil

courts to prosecute Mr Singh for contempt.

He was given a custodial sentence of eight months.

Mr Singh spent eight months in prison for lying

about his scamming in court.

Cases like these are crucial in the clampdown

on crash-for-cash, which is financially crippling the industry.

The industry estimate that crash-for-cash scams,

in total, cost about £400 million a year, and that cost is ultimately

passed on to all of us, you and I, who pay insurance premiums.

Often seen as a crime without time, cases like the LV one

are helping the IFB in their fight against crash-for-cash criminals.

Insurance fraud has probably been historically seen as an easy

target, so if anybody thinks they can still do this

and get away with it, my message is you can't.