Episode 7 Claimed and Shamed

Insurance fraud in the UK has hit epidemic levels.

It's costing us over £1.3 billion every year -

that's almost £3.6 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 14 fake claims every hour.

Armed with covert surveillance systems...

That's the subject out the vehicle.

..sophisticated data analysis techniques

and a number of highly skilled police units...

Police, don't move, stay where you are.

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

-Just don't lie to us.

All those con men, scammers and cheats on the fiddle

are now caught in the act

and claimed and shamed.

A man who was supposedly seriously injured in Bradford Lidl

stages a suspiciously rapid recovery.

He decided he'd get up and he walked out of the ambulance,

and went back into the store to speak to the store manager.

A healthy dose of scepticism is served on an accident

in a smoothie bar...

and a clumsy commuter's claim hits the buffers

when station CCTV disproves his story.

You can see that the cause of it is him

just being in such a rush and he's clearly not watched

his footing at the bottom of the stairs,

and he's just fallen down the steps.

Supermarket shopping isn't generally regarded as the hazardous activity.

At worst, you might forget the milk or find they've run out of

your favourite cereal.

But a shopper from Bradford recently suffered a serious injury

at his local branch of Lidl.

Good afternoon, AIG, David Halstead speaking.

David Halstead is from Lidl's insurers, AIG.

Mr Iqbal stated that he had slipped on a wet bakery bag

that was on the floor in his local Lidl store.

He sustained injuries to his lower back and to parts of his leg.

His claim would have been worth somewhere in the region

of £10-£12,000.

Concerned staff rushed to help, but almost immediately his

behaviour seemed at odds with the claim

that he'd been badly injured.

Mr Iqbal had actually insisted on an ambulance being called

to convey him to hospital.

However, once he'd gone into the ambulance and he was sat outside

the store, he decided he'd get up and he walked out of the ambulance,

and went back into the store to speak to the store manager to ensure

that they had accurately recorded the injuries that he

had sustained in that fall.

Hang on a minute.

He miraculously got out of the ambulance without assistance

and went back inside?

Was he off his trolley?

It wasn't long before Mr Iqbal contacted the supermarket

with a claim for compensation,

but the insurers were one step ahead

and had viewed the CCTV footage from the day of the accident.

It became obvious that Mr Iqbal had observed this bag on the floor.

He was positioning his shopping trolley to one side of the

bakery bag to stop anyone else interfering with it.

And then slowly he walks up to that bag and you can see,

once he's checked to see if anyone is watching him,

he then actually falls, quite dramatically, onto the floor.

Mr Iqbal hadn't counted on the CCTV cameras

showing what had really happened when he slipped on the bakery bag.

Given the evidence that we had, which was overwhelmingly demonstrative that

it was a fraudulent claim, really we had little option

other than to refer the matter to IFED.

Also known as the City of London Police's

Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department.

IFED specialise in combating insurance fraud.

Made up of an elite group of officers, including DC Mike Monkton,

they were immediately suspicious that Iqbal might have had previous.

Asking for it to be put in the accident books

will suggest there's a bit of preplanning

and knowledge of how the insurance industry works.

Most people wouldn't know that companies have accident books

and things need to be recorded.

Sure enough, the IFED investigation revealed that this

supermarket scammer was an unsavoury character.

When IFED started looking into Iqbal,

they discovered that he'd put a previous claim in.

In May that year, he'd claimed he was injured when visiting a gym.

He said he was using a punch bag, and apparently it came back and

hit him in the face.

And then he hit the gym's insurers with a claim for personal injury.

It was all starting to sound familiar.

Both cases were, sort of, grouped together,

so the Lidl case and the gym case

were referred to the Crown Prosecution Service.

He was charged with two counts of fraud by false representation.

He was sentenced, in total, to ten months' imprisonment,

which was suspended for a period of two years.

He was also ordered to complete 280 hours' community service.

Mr Iqbal, not only trying to defraud Lidl

out of the money to benefit himself,

there's naturally a cost to the emergency services, when they called

the ambulance out to take him to the hospital,

and again for the police when they were called

in to investigate this crime.

The fact that Iqbal was prepared to waste the precious resources

of the police and ambulance service,

who could have been helping people genuinely in need,

was reflected in the judgment against him.

He was also ordered to pay nearly £10,000 in costs,

that was divided between the two insurance companies,

and also an amount to the National Health Service.

I mean, in my opinion, Iqbal, he knew what he was doing,

he knew it was wrong to make these claims,

but he still tried to basically con the insurance industry out of money

that he wasn't entitled to.

If Mr Iqbal had used his loaf, he'd have realised that he

would never have gotten away with the bakery bag scam.

Mr Iqbal slipped up when he got back on his feet too quickly,

but across pond, this con artist managed to squeeze every last

drop from his smoothie bar fall.

On the face of it, Danny Johnston suffered a horrific accident

when he visited Juist-a-Minute.

Seen here entering the premises, he walks to the counter,

then innocently peruses the menu of fruity treats,

completely unaware of the lurking danger.

Before he can place an order, disaster strikes.

Man down.

Not exactly a small chap, Johnson takes a heavy fall.

Despite the other customers' heartless lack of concern,

he later claimed that he had possibly fractured his wrist.

Juist-a-Minute staff members call for help

and he's attended by the fire department.

A good 20 minutes after the fall,

he's eventually stretchered to a local hospital.

Johnson later attempted to claim compensation from Juist-a-Minute

for his fruity fall,

which he alleged had been caused by spilled liquid on the floor.

He claimed that the company had been negligent by not mopping it up

and making the area safe for its health-conscious customers.

The smoothie bar decided to check out his story and studied the CCTV.

The fall certainly looks bad but, less than a minute before,

this happened.

Let's see that again.

The man with a cap on deliberately pours his drink on the

floor using his right hand, which is partially shielded from the camera.

The position of the spilled liquid was in the exact

location of the fall.

He then leaves the premises and, seconds later, Johnson enters...

looks at the location of the spill, walks around,

doesn't purchase anything,

returns to the spill and then executes the fall.

The footage had effectively grassed up Johnson

and his accomplice David Williams.

The company crushed the claim

and passed their evidence to the authorities.

Juice-tice was served.

Williams received 12 months' probation,

community service and a large fine, while Johnson is still at large.

They'd been bananas to think they could get away with

extracting money from the smoothie bar

and callously wasting the fire department's precious time.

A fraudster is found out

when his tall tales turn out to be a stack of lies.

I think it's highly unlikely that he could have been burgled five

times and I think it's highly unlikely that he would have been

unlucky enough to be the victim of a street robbery three times.

Running isn't always good for you, especially if you're

late for a train...

You can clearly see this gentleman running into the station,

he's obviously in a great hurry.

Running, the way he is,

it's looking like it's a disaster about to happen.

..and the Royal Mail delivers on preventing postal insurance scams.

It was a satisfying result

in that the identified the fraud, we acted on it and we stopped it.

Many fraudsters slip up because they don't realise that insurance

companies share information about fraud.

Insurers also have long memories, as this next story demonstrates.

John Beadle, RSA's Counter Fraud Manager,

was involved from the beginning.

This case is a very good example that justice can sometimes take

a very long time.

So this was way back in August 2008,

when Mr Hussain took out a policy with us and, within a month,

made a claim for a burglary at his house in Leeds.

He alleged that a number of items amounting to some several

thousand pounds were stolen during this burglary -

these included a TV, a surround sound system,

a laptop, a Louis Vuitton bag,

a Cartier wristwatch, £500 cash and other expensive items.

Right from the start, doubts were raised about Mr Hussain's

version of events.

Well, we were a little suspicious because of the

close proximity to the claim to the policy being taken out,

although that can happen, of course.

Even so, the case warranted further investigation and RSA

took a closer look at the man who claimed to be the

innocent victim of a burglary.

We looked into the claim and, very quickly,

established that Mr Hussain

had made similar claims with two other insurers.

When we looked further into these with other insurers,

we realised they were for all the same items.

If the story Mr Hussain was telling was true,

then he'd owned three sets of the same items.

He'd been burgled three times and each time the burglars had

taken the same things.

He was either the unluckiest man in Yorkshire

or something wasn't right.

Proof of the latter came from his documentation.

When we shared the invoices supplied by Mr Hussain,

it became apparent that the invoices were identical.

So having been paid out by his insurers for these bogus claims,

he has then come to us, making an allegation of burglary

for the same items,

using the same invoices.

RSA immediately acted to stop the claim going through

and then reviewed their communications with Mr Hussain.

It's quite often the case that somebody who knows that their

claim is being investigated will actually be very aggressive

and push for immediate payment.

In this case, Mr Hussain was doing exactly that.

He was trying to put pressure on the claims handler to settle claim,

saying that he would complain to the

ombudsman about the poor service that RSA was providing.

But these bully boy tactics hadn't worked.

The insurers were convinced by the evidence that they had to put

a stop to Hussain's activities.

So we had determined that this was a complete and utter fraud

and we reported Mr Hussain

to the police and, needless to say, we did not pay this claim.

But Hussain was prepared to go to any lengths to avoid being

brought to book and he came up with an outrageous tactic to

try and escape justice.

Quite strangely in this case, Mr Hussain was alleging

that it wasn't him who was making the claim

and there's a mistaken identity,

and it was somebody else making the claim on his behalf.

Certainly we didn't believe him, but it just cast enough

doubt in the minds of the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS took the view that it wouldn't be safe

to continue with the prosecution and it was dropped at that time.

Sometimes these things happen and you have to just

shrug your shoulders and get on with the next case.

It was a bitter blow, but RSA had stopped Hussain in his tracks

and avoided a fraudulent pay-out.

As far as they were concerned, there the matter rested...

until five years later.

Out of the blue, we were contacted by Northumbria Police,

investigating an alleged street robbery involving Mr Hussain,

where he has had a number of very expensive items stolen

during the robbery.

It all sounded very familiar and, true to form,

Hussain hadn't stopped there.

They actually found he'd made three such claims.

I think it's highly unlikely that he could have been burgled five

times and I think it's highly unlikely that he would be

unlucky enough to be the victim of a street robbery three times.

Obviously, the police thought so as well

and all these cases were joined together,

and he was prosecuted for fraud, totalling in excess of £90,000.

So in early 2015, Mr Hussain appeared at Crown Court

charged with nine counts of fraud and, after a trial,

he was found guilty on all nine counts.

Mr Hussain was then sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

So after a five-year wait, we do feel that

justice was, at last, served.

Proving that the best things come to those who wait.

Online shopping has made it that much easier

to indulge your inner Imelda Marcos.

Shoes are big business.

Quick and efficient delivery services go hand-in-hand with

successful footwear sales.

But when things go wrong,

insurance is there to step in and foot the bill,

but only if the claim is genuine.

Martin Hancock is the Royal Mail investigation manager

and he looked into a case of shoe returns going walkies.

Royal Mail was receiving a number of compensation claims for missing

parcels going to a company in Cheshire.

Customers had been sending back shoes they'd bought that

didn't fit and requesting refunds,

but the company claimed that the parcels were going missing

in the post and told their customers

to claim a refund from the Royal Mail.

Over a 15-month period,

we received over 200 complaints for compensation for missing parcels.

Each claim varied between £10-£50 for the shoes.

In total, all the claims coming into Royal Mail

totalled around £7,500.

That's a big amount for Royal Mail,

especially on the volume of complaints.

It was disproportionate to other companies in the area.

It was a huge amount of money

and Royal Mail kicked off an investigation.

One of the first steps was to analyse the claims.

Sure enough, a pattern emerged.

It only affected first and second class parcels,

and not other parcels that were traceable.

The company were receiving signed for and special delivery items,

all these parcels were being delivered without any going missing.

The fact none of the traceable items were going missing was suspicious.

But there was a possible explanation.

We suspected the company on the majority of parcels going to

their premises for first or second class,

they were denying receipt of them.

They were actively encouraging them

to claim compensation from Royal mail.

Without trail of paperwork to prove otherwise,

the customers had to take the company's word for it.

The motivation was purely financial.

We believe that the company were telling customers that parcels

were going missing in the post so they could resell shoes

they had already sold before.

The company, by doing this, made money twice

out of the sale of the shoes.

They had potentially uncovered a huge scale fraud,

but they still needed solid proof.

We purchased shoes from them and returned the parcels to them.

We knew the parcels had been delivered and waited for a refund.

No refund came and, when we contacted them,

they told us our parcels had gone missing in the post.

It simply wasn't true, but the response confirmed

suspicions that at an organised scam was at foot.

As a result of our enquiries, we performed an operation that

involved searching the business and home premises.

During these searches, we recovered the shoes we had sent in and

also customers had sent in, and were allegedly missing in the post.

It was the evidence that the investigation team needed

and the company was now on the back foot.

We interviewed both the director of the company,

who admitted fraud that led to subsequent prosecution in court.

Both received a 12-month suspended sentence, £6,000 costs

for the investigation and court and had 200 hours' community service.

They also paid £7,500 compensation back to Royal Mail.

It was a satisfying result, in that we identified the fraud,

we acted on it and we stopped it.

And again, Royal Mail does that on every case.

The UK's roads are regularly patrolled by

organised criminal gangs

on the hunt for ordinary motorists like you and me.

Their aim?

To trigger induced collisions, so-called crash-for-cash accidents.

Detective Inspector Dave Hindmarsh,

of the Metropolitan Police explains how it works.

An induced collision is where you generally have what's called

a decoy car and a client car.

The client car's the car that they want someone to crash into.

Once they've found their target, then the decoy car will cause the

client car to break and a collision occurs.

These gangs don't care who gets hurt or how badly -

they just want to get their hands on the insurance money.

A staggering £392 million is fraudulently lost to

crash-for-cash gangs every year.

The police have had enough

and they're determined to get these criminals off our roads.

DI Hindmarsh recently broke one of the capital's biggest

crash-for-cash fraud rings.

This particular case was brought to us

by a uniformed officer in the south of London

who had come across a collision.

He'd become very suspicious about the collision.

There was some discrepancy around the ownership of the vehicle

and insurance, which had led to a individual being arrested.

He later found a crib sheet,

with, effectively, a how to commit an induced collision.

Further investigation into the suspect, named Malik Ahmad,

led the police officer to claims management company

called Star Accident Claims.

He identified that the person he'd arrested was in fact

the son of the owner.

The son, in fact, worked at the claims management company.

The fact that Ahmad, an employee of Star Accident Management,

had been involved in an induced collision

immediately put the operations of the whole company under suspicion.

The father, also named Malik Ahmad, was arrested too.

There was a search carried out, where the police officer seized

in excess of 56 files that he believed were suspicious.

The files that were taken were all collisions

that were in the process of being dealt with through the

insurance companies.

My team looked at 26 of the claims.

We contacted various individuals who were named within those

claims and identified that some of them

weren't even aware that their details have been used.

It proved to us that this company had been forging signatures,

forging people's details,

so saying that people were witnesses to a particular collision

when they weren't,

or that they had been in a collision

as a passenger when they had not been.

Accident management companies fraudulently exaggerating claims

for a bigger pay-out is sadly nothing new,

but the truly sinister aspect of this case was that the company was

inducing its own accidents,

putting other road users at risk of injury or even death.

Their motive was pure greed.

We only looked at 26 files.

Now, the value to the loss to the insurance companies

was around about £290,000.

The criminals were pocketing a staggering amount of money

and endangering others. They had to be shutdown.

We took the case to the Crown Prosecution Service,

who gave us the authority to charge four individuals.

Justice was then served on the four-man gang

who tried to claim £290,000.

The father and son received three and a half years' imprisonment.

Another individual, Jamal Akbar, received two years' imprisonment

And finally, Mashood Ahmed, received

a suspended two-year prison sentence.

Thanks to the efforts of DI Dave Hindmarsh and his team in pursuing

the mob of ruthless crooks,

there's one less crash-for-cash ring on the UK's roads.

And it's not just drivers who are preyed on by fraudsters.

Public transport is a major target too.

Someone who deals with this on a daily basis is Julia Randall,

fraud protection officer for a transportation company First Group.

As a company, we have a zero tolerance to fraudsters

and, therefore, all claims, regardless of value,

will be investigated thoroughly.

We see a constant flow of claims into the department where

a fraud has been attempted.

However, we will fight each and every

one of the claims and this year we have had some fantastic successes.

Anyone thinking about pursuing a fraudulent claim against us,

they should remember the tools we have in place -

CCTV, telematics, the latest analytical software -

we also have highly skilled and trained fraud operatives,

and we will push for the highest penalties.

And it's these tools that allows them to be so successful

in detecting and prosecuting fraud.

If you have an injury claim and it's genuine, that's fine.

We just want to pay you what it's worth.

But if you exaggerate your claim,

we can kick the whole claim out under fundamental dishonesty.

Julie and her colleagues at First Group,

like claims team manager Lee Ingram,

have long been training their sights on fraud.

Lee recently brought his expertise to a case at a train station.

A gentleman was claiming that he's injured his leg after

falling down some stairs.

According to the injured passenger,

it wasn't down to clumsiness or haste.

The claimant is saying that the cause

of his fall is due to the bottom step being defective,

possibly slippery due to its metal construction as well

due to the cold weather.

And also, the fact the hand rail

didn't go all the way down to the bottom step.

He's saying, for that reason, he's lost his footing on the last step

and fallen flat on his face.

The man backed up this claim with a medical report.

The injury claim submitted to us

involved a rupture to the Achilles tendon and a ruptured calf muscle.

The injury resulted in him being in plaster for around nine weeks.

He would've had private surgery costs.

He would've needed some help with his domestic chores.

It would have come to about £50,000, including legal costs,

so not a small claim.

Far from it. In fact, it was around double the average annual wage.

With such a large amount of money at stake, Lee decided to investigate

and discovered that no-one else had seen the fall.

There weren't actually any witnesses to this accident,

that we are aware of, other than probably the best witness

that we could have had, which was CCTV footage.

Ah, our old friend, CCTV footage.

Presumably this would corroborate this man's story,

especially as train stations have cameras everywhere.

You can clearly see this gentleman running into the station.

He's obviously in a great hurry to get to his train.

Running, the way he is, it's looking like it's a disaster about to happen.

You can see him running down the middle of the stairwell.

As he gets to the bottom here, he just takes a real heavy fall.

It is a nasty fall, it looks like it hurts.

To add insult to injury, the doors close

and the man also misses his train.

Looking at this footage, are we to blame for it is?

You can see that the cause of it is him just being in such a rush.

He's clearly not watched his footing at the bottom of the stairs

and he's just fallen down the steps.

Not for the first time in his career, Lee found that the

CCTV evidence was completely at odds with the claim.

There's no disputing the fact that this was quite a nasty fall,

it was never in doubt.

The question is - what has caused the fall?

According to the passenger, the main culprit was a defective step,

something else Lee looked at.

He's saying it's slippery when it's cold

and the metal is not appropriate material for this type of step.

So we've gone out and inspected it, and what we've actually found out

is that the step itself is made of concrete.

The temperature that day, having checked the weather records,

never dropped below four, so there was no freezing involved.

The steps are all coated with a non-slip surface,

so the step was definitely not defective.

Unsurprisingly, the claim came off the rails at this point.

We turned the claim down to his solicitors and

we've never heard from them since.

There are signs in most stations saying that you shouldn't

run in the station.

If you look back to when you were a child and running down a corridor,

you would have heard a teacher's voice saying, "Stop running."

There was a reason for that, it's dangerous to run in a busy place.

Accidents can happen.

Probably the moral to this particular story is that people need to

take more care to safeguard their own safety

and stop looking for someone to blame.