There are a huge amount of insurance claims made every year for road accidents and 70% of these are for whiplash. In 2010 there were 554,000 of these claims. It would be unfair to say that many of these claims were fraudulent because whiplash can be a very serious problem and many people are deserving of the compensation from an accident claim. However, in 2010 over 100,000 fraudulent claims were detected costing almost £1 billion.
Whiplash is a very popular choice of claim for those looking to take advantage of the system. As a medical condition it is very difficult to diagnose or disprove so in many cases it forces the system to give you the benefit of the doubt. It can be caused by almost any kind of car accident from a proper crash to a little bump.
This type of fraud has become very popular with the upsurge in personal injury claims companies offering no win no fee services. This makes it difficult for would be fraudsters to turn down the opportunity since they really have nothing to lose and stand to make some easy money. It has been known that people intentionally get into small road accidents so that they can claim or in some cases just make the accident up completely.
The Daily Mail recently reported that a company had been actively encouraging this sort of claim to customers with no intention of making a claim by “reminding them and suggesting to them that they may have whiplash”.
The government and relative authorities are in discussions about what to do about this serious fraud problem and are looking at raising the bar on what is good enough evidence for a whiplash accident claim.
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