Driving to a fraud charge
It has been revealed that the ringleader of a gang which staged more than 97 car accidents has been jailed for four-and-a-half years.
It is estimated that the crash-for-cash con artists netted a fortune worth £1.6 million in false accident claims, over a three year period.
Twenty-four other men connected to the scam will be sentenced this week for their part in a massive con to make fraudulent insurance claims.
The crime was only uncovered when several office workers in Cheshire, spotted the gang and ringleader crash repeatedly on the same roundabout.
Victim of the crash
One motorist who fell victim to their crimes spoke of his ordeal.
The unsuspecting driver, 30, was in a company van, driving from Wilmslow to Stockport with three work colleagues, when the incident occurred.
The ringleader, 24, and another man pranged into his vehicle. The man had never been in a car accident in 13 years of driving, but all that soon changed when the gang master slammed on the brakes of his Toyota Yaris at the Eden Point roundabout, near Cheadle, creating a collision.
As a result, the responsible road user was unable to avoid hitting the Yaris. There were no other drivers around during the crash and the criminal blamed a phantom biker.
The motorist stated: “They got out and rather comically had hold of their necks and were quite lethargic getting out of their cars, obviously feigning injury they were calm, collected and sort of as if they'd been through it before.”
In hindsight, it was a clear, pre-meditated plot to file an accident claim and a whiplash injury claim, but as the victim was a mature driver, he had no choice but to follow legal procedures.
He said the man stated: “Didn't you see the motorbike?” Then he presented his victim with a neatly-written note of what appeared to be his insurance details.
“We swapped insurance details and I thought it was a bit odd that his details were neatly written on a clean piece of paper. Usually, all you can find to write on is the back of a receipt. I never thought any more of it. It never crossed my mind that it could be a scam.”
The father-of-two furthered: “My first thought was, how am I going to tell my boss? I was definitely worried because nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I had a clean driving record at work until then and I'd only just started working for their base in Manchester.”
However, the victim was saved, because little did he know, the accident had been secretly filmed by the office workers, because they suspected trickery was a foot.
The photos were later passed onto the police, which helped them catch the ringleader and other members of the gang.
The motorist stated: “The firm's insurance company contacted me six months later. They showed me some pictures and it turned out the Yaris had returned to the same spot an hour after the collision and had done the same with another car. I was told [he] had been doing the scam for three years.”
He concluded: “I was lucky in the end because I was driving a work van, but a lot of other people will have been left out of pocket. It could have been very dangerous. These people didn't have a thought about anyone except themselves.
“I don't think it crossed their minds at all that they could have hurt or killed somebody,” he ended.
Richard Davies, deputy director of the Insurance Fraud Bureau said: “We now have the right controls and databases to allow us to pinpoint this activity and the bureau has now got 25 ongoing operations right across the country. I'm confident we're going to see many more convictions.”
It is thought that the gang charged £500 for each accident they faked.
Updated on 22/10/2009