Life Insurance Fraud

Ha. These are the schemes that make great movies and great television show plots. Here are some of those we've seen.

1. Crooks will take out an insurance policy on themselves and then fake their own death. How does that happen? Most of them travel to another country and then support their death claim with fraudulent documents. Very few are successful because insurance companies routinely investigate all foreign death claims.

2. A somewhat recent case involved a man who wanted to disappear from the radar screen because he didn't want to go to jail. It seemed so much easier to die, at least on paper, so he and his wife went to a pauper's cemetery and dug up a recently buried body. They put the body into the husband's car, drenched the whole thing in gasoline, then pushed it over a cliff. The car and body was burned beyond recognition, and the widow said, "oh my, it was my dear husband because he never came home last night and that was our car ..." She promptly buried the charred remains of her husband and filed a life insurance claim. Relatives got suspicious when she quickly found a new boyfriend who looking strikingly similar to her dead husband. The Police launched an investigation and the scam was discovered. Both are currently serving well-deserved jail sentences.

3. Too often people really do die. Wives kill (or hire it out) husbands and husbands kill wives. Children kill parents and parents kill children. All for the proceeds of an insurance policy. 

Stay tuned to our Gotcha page. The life insurance frauds make good reading.