FRAUDLINE
You, and Ealing Council,
are picking up the tab
for people involved
in insurance scams.
Recently, a family tried to
make money by falsely
claiming one of them had
been severely injured in
a fall. It cost the council
about £100,000 to prove
they were lying. And
it is your money the
fraudsters wasted.
E
aling Council sometimes
finds itself on the end of such
fraudulent insurance claims:
Either completely fabricated,
or exaggerated, by people looking to
make some money. In fact, one in five
insurance claims in the UK are fraudulent.
Every year, this fraud results in
millions of pounds of taxpayers’ funds
being wasted across the country.
These criminal attempts to steal from
the public purse are not victimless
crimes because you, the taxpayer, are
always left to pick up the bill – and,
consequently, funding for our local
services suffers.
This is because, even if an insurance
claim is turned down, you are still
paying for a case to be investigated
and defended in court. Every pound
TYPES OF FRAUD
we save by preventing this type of
fraud could be spent on local services
instead. In these tough economic
times, it is especially important.
HELP US STOP THEM
By calling FraudLine, you can help
us stop these crimes against our
community. If you think you have
some inform ation about a fraudulent
insurance claim you can call
0800 328 9270 – a special 24-hour
hotline. It is free and confidential,
and is manned by people with the
expertise to help.
The council, and FraudLine, has
the support of the governmentfunded Insurance Fraud Enforcement
Department, led by City of
London Police.
There are common types of
insurance fraud. These include
making exaggerated claims by
pretending an accident was
far worse than it really was;
untrue personal injury claims
that describe a false set of
circumstances, time or place of an
accident; completely bogus claims
that use invented symptoms or
an incident that never occurred;
and multiple claims where the
fraudster knowingly makes claims
for the same injury in a number of
different local authority areas
FRAUDLINE
Call the 24-hour freephone hotline
0800 328 9270
around ealing
Summer 2015
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