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UK: one insurance fraud committed every minute

Thanks for Jon-Paul Hale for bringing this article to our attention. In the UK there is an insurance scam being committed every minute. In 2017 a total of 562,000 insurance frauds were detected by insurers. Of these there were 113,000 fraudulent claims, and 449,000 dishonest insurance applications. The article describes some of the fraudsters claims and the punishments they received. Most of these are general insurance-related.

What's interesting about the article is that, either you can believe that people in the UK are peculiarly dishonest, or that their justice system is completely incapable of detecting when the insurer is having them on, or you begin to get the idea that some people feel that being dishonest with insurers is somehow 'okay', even, a kind of victimless crime. Of course, it has victims. The victims are insurers, and their shareholders - and you may not feel sorry for them - but mainly, they are other policy holders. It is worth noting, while looking at fraud statistics, that there are also case of just honest mistakes: people put the wrong thing down on the form, and insurers decline a claim that should be paid.

Mistakes happen everywhere. But if you read the article, you get a sense of the difference between fraud and mistakes.

You can even google insurance fraud videos. The one below is one of my favourites. 



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