Will be good to see the cheating public caught out in their attempts to defraud insurance companies. The more that fraud is committed, the harsher insurance companies become towards the honest claimant.
In my opinion, insurance companies do their best in a dishonest society.
Sorry don't agree. Insurance comapnies are becoming every bit as devious and corrupt as the 'cheating' public to which you refer. In my bitter experience insurers (and from my very bitter experience the Norwich Union) will do WHATEVER they want to undermine and ultimately destroy your will to fight against them and justify it by hiding behind the 'suspicious' claim scenario.
They most definitely adopt 'an end justifies the means' approach even if innocent people are hurt along the way. The couple on the show who had lost everything and had their claim denied by 'Churchill' looked pretty distraught to me. But what if they were totally innocent? What then - does a pathetic apology justify the extreme distress caused to these people? I don't think so.
The insurers obsession with fraudulent claims means that everything single claim is initially treated with a the view that it might be fraudulent. Every single claim will be minutely examined to see if there is a way of avoiding it and if there is they will.
Our insurers are too big and too powerful. The regulation that exists to protect us is routinely broken by them, as and when it suits them. Don't expect the FSA or the FOS to coming running to your aid because they won't. In my own case I PROVED that a Private Investigator, hired by my insurer, falsified the evidence he had obtained so as to give my insurers the 'proof' they needed. They were forced to accept that he lied about the 'evidence' he obtained. His punishment? Nothing. Zilch.
What do Norwich Union do about it? Nothing. I believe the PI still works for them. The FSA? They are currently investigating it but their rules do not permit me to know the outcome of their enquiries. The FOS? They accept the PI lied but do nothing. The PI's 'regulatory' body? Nothing but dodges and twists and turns.
I think it has got to the point now where insurance companies are no better than their 'crooked' policy holders - so they deserve everything they get.
Sorry Walter, I have to disagree with you. Obviously you have had a bad experience which unsurprisingly will make you biased towards insurance companies. Yes, perhaps this couple did lose everything but can we be certain that their claim was not inflated? Statistics show that whilst genuine losses do happen, the vast majority of claimants see nothing wrong with inflating/exaggerating their claims and this is where the problem lies. Why should insurers accept the word of claimants? Investigations have to be done and if anything is deemed to be fraudulent/exaggerated then they are within their rights to decline. In fact a survey showed that 10% of people would make a fraudulent claim. 10% of people would definitely not, whereas 80% did not know whether they would (depending on circumstances). So who can blame insurers for fully investigating even the smallest of claims?
I have no issue with insurers investigating claims - they are commercial enterprises and have the right do what they see fit. It is the methods they are willing to employ that concerns me. They can not pontificate and take all the moral high ground if, just like some of their customers, they are willing to lie and cheat to avoid paying claims.
We live in a world where taregts and key performance indicators are everywhere. How do you know that insurers don't set their claims people 'targets', based around the supposed fact of so many percentage of claims being spurious. In a culture like that, clams handlers will want claims to fraudulent, just to meet some ridiculous target or other.
There is also the adversarial nature of claimant / insurer - nobody really likes paying insurance and therefore nobody really likes insurance companies. Right from he beginning things can become adversarial and then you can have situations where individuals are motivated by more factors - like the fact that they may dislike a particular claimant.
This is a complex area, which isn't helped by the snail like pace of the complaints process. Currently it will take someone over 18 months to go through the mandatory complaints process, finishing with a decision by an ombudsman working for the FOS.
One thing that came across from the show was that people are still working on instinct, on a gut feeling. There should be no place for that. Insurers know that the burden of proof in a claim is on the 'balance of probabilities' and in high value claims they will use to this to their advantage if they know that they can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a claim is fraudulent.
This programme made good TV but what it didn't do was show the affect an insurer getting it wrong can have on an individual. Being wrongly accused of being a fraudster caused me to consider taking my own life - but who would, other than my family and friends, have given a damn?
