James Warren
POLICE in Malaga have dismantled a ‘crash for cash’ insurance fraud scheme leading to arrests across the city.
Police have made 17 arrests in total in a gang dedicated to faking car accidents to claim compensation from unsuspecting insurance companies.
The intricate scheme involved many facets that ranged from fake ‘damage inspectors’ to fabricated medical certificates.
Police were alerted to the gang when an un named insurance company enlisted the help of an accident investigator to look into a potentially fraudulent case.
During the investigations a video emerged that broke open the case of a gang of expert fraudsters, and led police into a rabbit hole of crash for cash operations.
The video showed an unnamed man at the wheel of a car outside a garage in the Cartama area of Malaga, repeatedly driving into another stationary car.
It emerged that the man was an expert in recreating exact cosmetic damage on vehicles to match forged incident reports.
Upon identifying the man thanks to the branding of the workshop shown in the video, police discovered a network of criminals behind the spike in insurance claims across the city.
As details of the schemes were revealed, the intricacy of the operation became clear.
The gang would recreate damage on specific vehicles in a deliberate and accurate way, then they would ‘hire’ an damage assessor to review the damage and sign it off in an official document.
In the accident report, police noticed that the accidents happened usually during holiday periods, where there was very few cars on the road, but the cars would always contain many passengers to maximise payouts.
Members of the gang would also admit themselves into hospital to gain fake medical certificates for injuries supposedly sustained during the accident.
Eventually police performed raids on a number of properties in the Cartama area of Malaga and arrested 17 individuals, all Spanish and ranging between 18 and 58 years old.
