Received a letter from my insurance company today:
"A claim has been intimated against you following an incident alleged to have occurred on 19/06/09"
Now it seems to me that two months is quite a while to report an accident, especially since they have the "number plate" of the other car. Now I know for a fact that I wasn't involved, so what's likely to happen now and how long is it likely to take to sort it out? Anyone have any experiences they can share?
Edited by Pugugly on 10/09/2009 at 21:12
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Assuming you were not involved.
Write to your Ins Co saying you were not involved in an accident on 19/6. State in the final paragraph that you hope the matter is now closed.
Send it recorded delivery
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Seems to me this is one of those unfortunate circumstances where the burden of proof is in danger of being reversed.
Might be handy if you can prove where your car was on the date of the accident.
You could also ask the insurance company to send an engineer to inspect it to prove it has not had any recent repair.
Edited by ifithelps on 10/09/2009 at 21:21
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Before attempting to dismiss the allegation outright would it not be prudent to request a few details as to when , where and what are the allegations?
Another point is that if you are not aware then you 'failed to stop/report' in which case why has there not been a Police inquiry?
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My wife had a similar experience some 10 years ago..
She witnessed a large Range Rover hit the rear of a BMW 7 series. It was the range rovers fault, but the BMW was driven by a Chinese man with a poor grasp of English. She pulled over ahead of the BMW 7 series and went to the Chinese mans windows with a piece of paper where she had written her telephone number and name and address and offered to act as a witness. The Chinese gentleman thanked her and watched her return to her Rover Kensington (AKA Metro). Both cars were seriously damaged in the accident, and probably write offs.
About 3 weeks later we got claims from both insurance companies against my wife!! The wide boy in the Range rover spotting an opportunity convinced the Chinese man to claim against my wife and he did as well. Now I stress: in NO way was my wife involved in the accident....she daw it happen in front of her and did the good citizen bit by pulling over and offering to witness.
The Insurance company for the range rover which was around 1 year old was claiming £16,000 of damage and the Insurance company for the BMW 7 series also 1 year old was claiming around £18,000. Both quoted massive front and rear end damage. The accident reports were apparently my wifes Rover Metro (tiny bean can of a supermini) pulled in front of the range rover and braked, causing the range rover to shunt my wifes car into the back of the BMW!
I contacted both insurance companies and explained exactly what had happened.....all to no avail. I rang them both and asked them how they could possibly believe that a Metro could be squashed between both these cars causing a sum total of 34,000 of damage and still be drivable. Even more incredible, was how could this happen and leave NO damage at all on my wifes Metro. The insurance "experts" assured me this was quite possible and continued the claim!
Now anyone who has seen a Metro will not they were not Rover (or previously British Leylands) best cars being neither robust nor particularly safe in an accident and were very small cars.
We had to get our insurance company involved and luckily we had paid for the legal assistance option when renewing the policy that year. Our insurance company sent an assessor down to look at my wifes car, who obviously stated it had not been in an accident of any kind. BOTH of the other insurance companies were unwilling to accept this and later sent their own assessors down, both assessors spent approximately 1 hour each inspecting the car. Even after this the other companies still tried to pursue the claim and our insurance company fortunately decided not to pay and offered to go to court (we were actually worried that they might figure it cheaper to just pay rather than go to court and then she would have lost the no claims)..
Only after that point did the other 2 insurance companies drop their claims...ridiculous state of affairs I know, but it took about 4 months to get resolved and a lot of hassle.
The net result being that unless there was a death, I don't believe either my wife or I would want to get involved in becoming a witness for an accident ever again and would probably just drive on!
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seems that what your wife did was unwittingly interrupt a fraudulent insurance claim, so the crooks turned their attention on her
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Just forward it onto your ins co recorded and make a copy of it.
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Phone and write to your insurance company updating them of this straightaway. Also insist in writing that you have no involvement in the incident and they must volunteer no reconciliation of any kind without your express permission.
I didn't take a similar claim seriously and my insurance (the sailor with the daft hat) decided to act on this entirely malicious claim and paid out to this insurance fraudster and reduced my NCB!
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