Episode 1 Claimed and Shamed

Insurance fraud has reached epidemic levels in the UK.

It's costing us more than £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 around £50 to your insurance bill.

But insurers are fighting back,

exposing just under 15 fake claims every hour.

Armed with covert surveillance systems...

That's the subject out of the vehicle.

..sophisticated data analysis techniques...

BREAKS SCREECH AND GLASS SMASHES

Police!

..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 conmen, scammers and cheats on the fiddle are now

caught in the act,

and claimed and shamed.

..millions of pounds' worth of cars stolen from UK roads are

seized and repatriated from Africa.

When the police raided the compound,

they uncovered 29 vehicles all stolen from the UK.

The case is closed on a woman's lost luggage scam.

And a bogus personal injury claim after a minor bus prang

runs out of road.

There was no movement. There was laughing and joking.

Most people were unaware that a collision had occurred.

Now, if you've ever had an accident on the road, you'll know it

can be costly and quite frankly a right pain in the rear bumper.

Fortunately insurers can provide a replacement hire vehicle to

get you back on the road quick smart.

But there are some sneaky scammers out there who will fabricate

an accident purely to get their hands on one of these vehicles.

With 186,000 road traffic accidents reported every year

in the UK...

SCREECHING BRAKES/LOUD BANG

..companies like Accident Exchange are kept busy supplying

replacement hire vehicles to motorists in need.

Neil Thomas is their Director of Investigative Services and

heads up their Asset Protection Unit.

APU are crucial in terms of protecting the cars,

so we investigate any potential fraud.

We help Accident Exchange and other companies look after their fleet.

Neil and his team do this with the help of state-of-the-art

tracking systems which are fitted to every one of their vehicles.

With APU, we use extremely advanced technology in all the cars.

This technology will tell us if there's any untoward

behaviour in the car.

It was this cutting-edge system that first flagged

a potential problem with one of their vehicles, because bizarrely

it was showing the car's location as Le Havre in France.

We know that people go from the UK to France for lots of reasons.

However, the technology's so sophisticated,

we could tell that it wasn't on a road,

it was in a container.

It was on a container ship in a harbour.

Now, that really gave us some concerns.

Fearing for the safety of his customer,

Neil attempted to get in touch.

So, we tried to contact the client.

We couldn't speak to the client at all.

The customer might have vanished into thin air,

but the car was on the move again.

The next thing we knew, it turned up in a place called

Salalah, which is in Oman, which is in the Middle East.

Now, again, that's a long way for a car,

a hire car to be taken by a member of the public or a client.

Neil's team began to investigate the customer's original claim for

a replacement hire vehicle

and their enquiries revealed some alarming information.

This vehicle was a Lexus

and it had been chosen by the client,

so he had, it turns out, made up the circumstances of a road

traffic collision and gone to some lengths to obtain a replacement car.

So, the original insurance claim was completely bogus.

Once the car had been acquired through insurance fraud,

it was delivered to the gang member posing as a genuine customer,

who simply disappeared with the vehicle.

But Neil soon discovered that his missing Lexus was just the tip

of a massive iceberg when it was contacted by the National

Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service.

When NVCIS became involved in the investigation, it became

clear that this wasn't just one vehicle taken from the UK.

This was an organised gang, a multi-million-pound operation.

Cars were being stolen predominantly in the south-east and London

and being exported from the UK into Africa.

A startling discovery.

Investigators were dealing with a global network of car thieves

stealing vehicles from UK roads.

They were, in fact, being taken to order and sold on to make

millions of pounds.

Agents were facing an unknown number of fraudulently obtained and

stolen vehicles,

but thanks to the tracker on board the Lexus, UK law enforcement

had a unique opportunity to bust the entire operation.

But it relied on Neil's willingness to take a huge gamble.

We could have just made a decision to say we'll just have the hire car back.

We decided and I decided that we wanted to be part of the

investigation and help other people get their cars back as well.

And with many of the gang's victims yet to be paid out by their

insurance companies, there was a slim chance that

APU could save the industry hundreds of thousands of

pounds by locating and helping to recover the stolen vehicles.

So, our stolen Lexus was being tracked from inside a

moving shipping container.

After leaving the UK,

it had travelled by sea to the French port of Le Havre.

It was then shipped around the tip of Spain,

across the Mediterranean Sea, where it passed between Egypt and

Jordan, and made its way to Mombasa, Kenya.

It was then transported overland to Kampala, Uganda,

where its journey ended.

The hope was that the Lexus would lead investigators directly

into the heart of the gang's operation.

Once the cars had been tracked to Kampala itself,

we needed to use the technology to identify,

with pinpoint accuracy, exactly where they were.

And the location of the Lexus turned out to be

a bonded warehouse in the heart of Kampala.

Using this information, Ugandan police and officers from the

UK's National Crime Agency made their way to the location.

When the police raided the compound where the Lexus was, they uncovered

not just the Lexus, but 29 other vehicles all stolen from the UK.

In total, about £1 million worth of UK cars.

An unprecedented seizure

and an estimated £700,000 worth of losses that insurers would

have already paid out to customers.

With the cars now secured, they were taken to

a government compound, but Neil's work wasn't done yet.

We were asked by the UK police to go with them to Uganda and then

track all of the cars from Uganda, through Kenya,

back on the boat and do a reverse trip back to the UK.

Having come this far in the investigation,

Neil wasn't about to back out now.

I, representing APU, went personally to Uganda to make sure that

the final stage of the operation went as well as the initial stage.

When Neil arrived in Uganda, he saw first-hand the scale of the

criminal operation that had been uncovered

and it was all thanks to the tracking technology fitted to

the Lexus that had been fraudulently obtained from

Accident Exchange.

The footage we're looking at now is footage I filmed when I flew

to Uganda.

It's not long before Neil spots what had effectively been his

undercover operative, the stolen Lexus.

Just inside the Ugandan revenue authority.

This is the first sighting we have of what we think is our Lexus.

As you can see, quite a few cars lined up here.

Very nice, very expensive cars.

But we know they've been here for at least six months.

So, I think they just need a little bit of...

..TLC to say the least.

This one's actually got a tax disc holder from the UK.

Looking at all the vehicles, there's only probably one,

maybe two that have got slight damage.

It's no good trying to steal a car and then trying to sell it on

when it's damaged.

The ones we're interested in are,

particularly from my point of view, the Lexus, which is there.

You'll see it's quite dusty and they're all covered in dust.

This is inside the Lexus.

As you can see, it needs a little bit of a clean-up.

These are the papers that were in the car.

The cars were recovered in the nick of time.

When we looked at the vehicles in more detail,

the identities had been changed.

So, most vehicles have got a visible identity number,

a VIN number, on the windscreen.

They'd all been changed and most of the personal identification

features for the vehicles have been taken off.

And you can see that they're all high-end vehicles ready to be

sold on to innocent purchasers.

This was a ground-breaking operation.

The images you see now are the official handing over of the

keys, so physically handing over the keys from Uganda to the UK.

This is the first time that anything like this has happened,

so I'm really proud to have been involved in it.

This long, complex investigation had taken Neil and law

enforcement officers from the UK all the way to Africa,

but there was still a long way to go.

Once we were comfortable that the cars were roadworthy,

then we had the challenge of getting them back to the UK.

Vehicles were loaded into containers and shipped across land in

a road train across the border from Kampala,

back into Kenya and then do a reverse journey.

But this return journey was a perilous one and posed serious risks to all involved.

We didn't know who we were dealing with

and the organised gang, they've got a lot to lose.

We're talking at the time £1 million worth of cars.

There's always a potential that the convoy may have been attacked

en route.

Still to come...

the stolen vehicles are back on home soil.

This is the first time that cars have been repatriated from Africa.

I really want to see the Lexus back.

Now, a well-earned holiday is a wonderful thing.

Travel insurance gives you the peace of mind that should your

siesta in the sun turn into a bout of tourism trauma, you're covered.

But unfortunately there are those who think making

a false claim is all part of the package deal.

Whether you're a sun lover, culture connoisseur or thrill-seeker,

there's a travel insurance policy to cover you.

CEGA specialise in travel insurance services.

Their head of special investigations, Simon Cook,

knows his all-inclusive scams from his five-star swindles.

He was presented with one claim which is unfortunately all too common.

The customer contacted us and explained that, unfortunately,

she'd been subjected to a theft whilst on holiday in New Zealand.

She told us that she was in the airport waiting for some

friends when the bag was stolen off her trolley.

A nightmare start to any trip and the losses were reported to go

well beyond a holiday wardrobe and snorkel set.

The customer was claiming for around £800 in cash,

was claiming for some jewellery, which included an engagement

and wedding ring, and also a high-end mobile phone.

The value of the claim was approximately £4,000.

That's a big claim for just one bag, but it was the alleged

contents of the suitcase which caught Simon's attention.

I wouldn't say that the cash and the mobile phone were unusual in

terms of what you would carry around with you, but it was very

surprising to see her claiming for an engagement and wedding ring

being in the bag, because naturally you would wear those items.

The customer had reported the theft to the New Zealand police at

her first opportunity,

who would have listed everything claimed to have been stolen.

Due to the value of the claim and the fact that some of the

high-value items weren't listed on the police report,

we made a decision to speak to the customer by way of telephone

interview just so we could get a better understanding of what

exactly happened.

The claims handler from Simon's team made the call.

It seemed like a plausible story.

Whilst we were happy with the information the customer

provided regarding the circumstances of the incident,

she couldn't accurately describe to us why all these high-value

items were missing off the police report.

The police in New Zealand were contacted to clear up the confusion,

but it led to a shocking discovery.

The police officer we spoke to was extremely helpful,

but he did tell us that, in fact,

the customer had had her bag returned

to her some three weeks prior to her contacting us to make the claim.

This obviously begged the question why the customer was claiming

for the bag and its entire contents.

Armed with this information, we decided to get back in

contact with the customer to ask her about the situation.

The claimant was given an opportunity to come clean.

So, the tight-lipped claimant wasn't going to be much help,

despite the overwhelming evidence.

The police had told us that she had had the bag and the contents

returned to her some three weeks prior to making the claim

and, therefore, we wanted to know why she, in essence, lied to us about the situation.

The call handler uses that fact to challenge the claimant.

One explanation that the customer provided was that she knew we

were going to make enquiries with the police, so she didn't tell us

any information about what the police had done.

It's the equivalent of having a car crash and relying on a

witness to report the accident.

But the claimant was determined to get something for nothing.

She still said to us that we should pay her for the items that

were in the bag, but ultimately we'd already been told by the

police that she had the bag returned with all the items in it.

After telling the customer that we knew that she had had the bag

returned to her with the contents, she did actually decide to admit

that she did receive the bag back, but there were no contents in it.

It was hardly a full confession, but the investigator was finally

starting to get a handle on the truth.

We made it very clear to the customer that we knew that

the bag and its contents had been returned to her.

Well, he can and with good reason he did.

The customer was extremely naive, because she didn't feel that we

would make further enquiries into her claim.

Opportunists continue to underestimate insurers

and this claimant was lucky to avoid a criminal prosecution.

I honestly don't think some customers who make fraudulent

claims do realise the gravity of what they're doing.

Fraud is a criminal offence at the end of the day and you could

get a criminal prosecution as a result of insurance fraud.

Whatever your favoured mode of public transport,

we all hope to be carried from A to B safely.

However, accidents do happen and most passengers are honest

about any injuries sustained, but some look to leech off

transport companies by exaggerating injuries

and submitting fraudulent claims.

FirstGroup operates services throughout the UK.

With some 6,300 buses on the road, the odd incident is inevitable.

Just like one which fraud prevention officer Julie Randle dealt with

involving two of their double-deckers.

We were presented with several personal injury claims

for a very minor accident involving one of our buses

clipping the back windscreen of another one of our buses.

It was a genuine accident, our driver simply misjudged his distance

when pulling out and it made a small crack to the windscreen.

Unfortunate, but looking on the bright side,

at least no-one was hurt. Or so they thought.

We were extremely surprised to receive eight injury claims

come through as a result of an extremely minor accident,

with a total valuation of around £200,000.

An astonishing figure considering the slight nature

of the reported prang.

So it didn't take FirstGroup long to make a decision.

We repudiated all of the claims.

Two claims persisted and that was a mother and her daughter.

The claimant alleged that she sustained soft tissue injuries

to her neck, her upper back and her shoulders.

She alleged that she couldn't do her cooking, domestic chores,

she couldn't pick her child up.

The child had injuries to her neck as well

and it was alleged she had time off school.

The reported condition of the mother and daughter

required immediate attention.

She alleged her injuries were so severe that she had to undergo

a course of physiotherapy treatment

and she had to go on lighter duties at work.

With such significant injuries,

this wasn't going to be a cheap claim to settle.

We valued her claim in the region of around £30,000.

This would be made up of treatment fees

of her physical and her psychological injuries,

and her loss of earnings.

And it would appear that brute force exerted by a single bus wing mirror

was far more than anybody could have imagined.

The claimant alleged that the incident was so serious

that she was thrown around in her seat and she had to hold on

to the bar in front to stop herself from falling.

It must have been quite the impact.

Luckily, all FirstGroup buses are packed with CCTV cameras.

When we looked at the footage, we were expecting to see

several passengers moving from their seats, thrown to the floor,

jolted backwards and forwards.

So let's have a look at this alleged driving disaster.

Viewer discretion is advised

as you may find some of what you're about to see shocking.

SQUEAKING

OK, not quite the devastation we expected.

Nothing happened.

If you look very closely to your top right,

there's the wing mirror of the bus pulling out

as it glances the back window of the one in front.

There was no movement, there was laughing and joking,

and most people were unaware that a collision had occurred.

This lady's alleged that she was

thrown backwards and forwards in her seat.

She had to grab the bar in front to stop herself from falling off.

Looking at the footage and she doesn't move!

So not quite the chaos the claimant had described.

Having viewed the footage, it was clear that all eight claimants

had completely fabricated their claims.

There was no injuries caused by the coming together of two buses.

It was extremely minor damage and we were never going to pay out.

And a little digging revealed that this claimant

had an interesting past.

Having checked out this lady's claims history,

lo and behold, she had not just one claim but three claims

in the few years prior to our incident.

She was well versed in the claims process and it was no surprise to us

that she was trying it on with us.

Despite the conclusive evidence,

the claimant refused to put the brakes on her claim,

but there was no way FirstGroup were rolling over on this one.

With overwhelming evidence,

we decided we were going to see these two claims through.

We instructed our solicitors to deal on our behalf and we were going

to take it through the courts.

The case proceeded to trial.

As you'd probably expect, having seen the CCTV footage,

the judge was not taken in by her lies and her deceit.

Not only was the claim thrown out, but the judge said,

and I quote, "It is as clear as a pikestaff

"that this claimant has been fundamentally dishonest

"in pursuing their claim."

There was no doubt this was a grossly exaggerated claim

and the woman wasn't going to be allowed to walk away

from this transport treachery.

Yes, it was a great result, but we were never going to leave it there.

We are now pursuing this claimant for nearly £15,000 in costs.

A high price, you might think, for trying to make a quick buck.

Now, earlier we followed Neil Thomas from Accident Exchange

on a mission to Africa to retrieve a stolen Lexus 4x4

which had been obtained with a bogus car insurance claim.

Thanks to a hi-tech tracker fitted to the Lexus,

a huge criminal operation had been uncovered

leading to the discovery of dozens of vehicles

that had been stolen from UK roads.

Authorities seized the vehicles

and loaded them on a cargo ship bound for the UK,

and they were attracting quite a bit of attention en route.

A haul of 28 luxury cars stolen to order

have been recovered by police at Southampton docks

in what authorities say is one of the biggest recoveries of its kind.

On 22nd March 2016, almost a year after illegally leaving the UK,

the cars sailed into Southampton, eagerly awaited by Neil

and officers from the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service.

So this really is an unprecedented international operation,

working with the National Crime Agency, NaVCIS, who are the police,

Interpol and the Ugandan authorities.

This is the first time that cars have been repatriated from Africa,

but it's more than the Lexus. It's more than one car.

It's 20-plus cars that are coming back,

all with victims, all of which started in the UK.

The vehicles are carefully unloaded.

The final container to be opened contains the Lexus.

Neil and NaVCIS police officer Nathan Ricketts watch and anxiously wait.

This is the Lexus. This is the first time we've seen it

since it's been back in the UK.

Looks very dusty but well strapped in.

Certainly better strapped in than it was with the thieves, I would guess.

Great to see it back.

Having travelled around 30,000 miles across six countries,

the Lexus is finally back in Neil's possession,

giving him the opportunity to give it a proper once-over.

A little bit of cosmetic damage, a few scuffs,

but the general condition,

considering the amount of miles it's covered, is absolutely amazing.

This was done by a professional gang changing the identity

and they looked to get as much money as they can from reselling the car,

and with this, probably, they'd probably get £30,000-£40,000.

And that's just one car.

It's estimated that collectively over £700,000 worth of vehicles

have been repatriated.

Nathan is the NaVCIS officer in charge of receiving

the rest of the high-end motors.

That container was the last container

for us to open and remove the cars.

That's the car that started all this off.

If there wasn't a tracking device in it, we wouldn't have all the vehicles here that we can see.

The recovery of these vehicles will hit the gang hard.

The disruption in relation to criminality has been huge.

The criminals have lost their profit.

They've sent those vehicles there to be sold to make their money.

We've taken them vehicles back now,

so there's frustrating members of that group,

there will be infighting, arguing,

people who've paid out on vehicles and they haven't got them because we've taken them.

The repatriation is not only good news for the owners of the vehicles,

but also UK motor insurers,

who very nearly lost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The benefit to the UK as well,

the insurance industry will be getting obviously the massive losses

that they pay out on these vehicles,

a big chunk of money will be coming back to them,

and four vehicles actually didn't have an insurance pay-out,

so four people are going to get their cars back.

I'm really satisfied with how this has gone, but I know

there's a lot more work to do and I think we've got more work

to get stuck into to identify and arrest the people involved.

From the thieves' point of view, this should send a strong signal

that they can be tracked globally

and we're bringing the fight to them.

And there's one particular individual who investigators

are very keen to locate and that's the claimant who submitted

the fraudulent insurance claim to get his hands on the Lexus

that started this entire investigation.

To this date, we haven't been able to get in touch with the client.

He has disappeared,

so I'm convinced that he'll have a few questions to answer

when the police finally catch up with him.

From organised criminal gangs to exaggerated household claims,

insurance fraud hits all of us in the pocket.

But instead of getting away with it, more and more of these fraudsters

are being Claimed and Shamed.