Scams suddenly
real when guy fakes tumble during bus ride
Imagine coming home from a long day at work. You climb on
a full bus. Soon the vehicle suddenly screeches to a halt. An elderly man
outside falls onto the pavement. The bus hit him at a stop light, he screams in
seeming pain. The passengers have to clear out, and you’re still a mile from
home.
You hear ambulance sirens rushing to the scene. Yet
nobody’s fooled. Children and adult passengers are calling out this fraudster.
They’re yelling things like, “He just wants to get money!”
You remember sitting in the front of the bus, and it
never touched the man … at all. No bump, no thump.
If you’re wondering if that insurance grab happened … it
did … to me.
I’m an insurance-fraud researcher with the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. I
read about and see videos of fraudsters faking slip and
falls all the time. They seemed like a fantasy until I saw this guy’s scam
first-hand.
Slip-and-fall cons may steal billions of dollars a year.
Honest businesses are sued. They pay in higher premiums. We pay in higher
prices at the cash register.
Some fraudsters place liquid detergent or other slippery
stuff on supermarket floors. They sit down on the floor and scream they slipped
on the mess. They’re blithely unaware that security cams record every false
move.
Selena Edwards of California claimed a scalding cup of
hot coffee with a loose lid slipped off and burned her hand at a McDonald’s
drive-thru. But she’d used a photo of someone else’s burned hand. And her
medical records also were forged. Edwards was convicted.
Some consumers even joke about it on social media.
Slip-and-falls are a quick way to make big bucks, people
often yack. Search the hash tag #BoutToSlip on Twitter. You’ll see youngsters
joking about slipping and falling to claim insurance money. This kind of peer-to-peer
chatter can egg others to fake a money-grabbing slips.
Or check out the #insurancefraud hash tags on Vine and
Instagram. Plenty of quick videos of young people joking how to pay college
tuition by scamming insurers with bogus tumbles.
My experience on the bus plus my research with the
Coalition made one thing clear: Slip-and-falls are a big waste for everyone.
This is especially true of scammers who end up with permanent criminal records
after their cons slipped, fell and broke.
