Insurance Fraud in L.A.

I am a trial attorney and a good deal of my practice is representing plaintiffs in personal injury claims.

Recently, a young man walked into my office with a strange tale; he was of Asian descent, spoke almost no English (he had brought along a friend to translate) and he had been involved in an accident last year with what turned out to be an uninsured motorist. He had a passenger in his car at that time. Both he and his passenger were uninjured. He does not remember any injuries to the other driver, whom he said was completely at fault. He went to an attorney recommended by a friend of his father because he wanted to make sure everything was done correctly. That attorney did not take his case. The young man did nothing more on the matter.

Recently when he got his insurance renewal notice, he noted that he had been surcharged for a chargeable accident against him! (That’s the reason he came to me--to find out if I could do something about the more expensive premium.) He began to track down the facts and learned that the other driver had claimed against him, and the young man’s passenger had claimed against him. Nothing remarkable in that. But the “passenger” making the claim was never in the young man’s car! And that “passenger” was apparently represented by the attorney that the young man went to in the first place!

Since this seemed an obvious case of pure insurance fraud (note that if the young man’s facts turned out to be true, it meant that there were at least two people perpetrating the fraud--the “passenger” and the lawyer), I called the young man’s insurance carrier and spoke to the adjuster handling the claim. She told me that since the carrier had already secured releases and sent checks which had been cashed, “their hands were tied,” and they wouldn’t be doing anything else on the claim. She suggested that I call the district attorney’s office. I did, and was told that they wouldn’t do anything on it and suggested that I call the Department of Insurance. I did that and spoke to an anonymous clerk who told me that there wasn’t much that the department would do, but would send me out a “form” if I wished to fileone!

That’s when I gave up. If the insurance company doesn’t care, and the district attorney doesn’t care, and the Department of Insurance doesn’t care, then exactly who is it that does care about this?

And I really don’t want to read anything more about how put upon the insurance industry is regarding its losses in the Los Angeles area through fraud! If the insurance companies don’t give a damn, then why should the public?

BERT L. ROGAL

Beverly Hills