Shame on the news media for reporting today that we have a major problem with people fraudulently causing crashes and faking their injuries. Who wrote this story, the insurance companies who don’t want to pay fair value for their claims unless and until they are sued?
If you got past the screaming headline and did the math that appeared further down, you learned that while there were 5,800,000 collisions reported to the police in 2009, only .0008% of them — less than one-thousandth of one percent! might possibly have involving a fraudulent accident. And we had very few of them here in Texas.
While I obviously deplore any attempt to defraud an insurance company, the headline should have been
99.99999% of Acccidents Are Legitimate. But that wouldn’t have sold any newspapers.
This is one of the reasons that the personal injury process is so frustrating. Honest policy holders with legitimate collision claims are often suspected of fraud for no reason whatsover. Lately I have had more demands for recorded statements from adjusters in cases of clear liability. I reject these demands.
Please call me if you feel like you are being treated unfairly by an insurance company.