A few years ago a car clipped my rear quarter panel while he was attempting to make a left.
I drove to a geico (his insurance company) adjuster and they wrote me a check for $3000.
I had bare minimum liability insurance and nothing happened to my rates.
All in all a pleasant experience that netted me some spare cash.
Now finally my questions. Can I buy a car I don’t care about and repeatedly get into accidents that aren’t my fault and rake in the cash?
at least once a month, I have a somewhat near-miss due to another driver’s mistake. What if my reaction time wasn’t as good and I just let them hit me?
What if I actively hunted for drivers doing illegal things (they do not have the right of way) and I plowed into them?
I’m not concerned about the morality of these actions. Just want to know if I can conceivably get into many accidents this way, all where I am not at fault, and make money driving from accident scenes to adjusters all day long.
I know we have a couple insurance adjusters here. Stuff like this will catch up with you and eventually the insurance companies will tag you as a scammer or the unluckiest bastard in the world. In addition, if a insurance company attorney sees you have dozens of payouts for non-fault accidents while reviewing your case you are probably going to find your game identified, I doubt you would be the first such individual they have identified and dealt with.
Either way, your insurance rates would climb and it would become a non cost effective system in short order.
I live near a few really messy intersections with poor visibility or exotic restrictions. I live near a “No U-Turn” only on one side of an intersection, and its one of maybe 3-4 “no u turn” spots I can name in the whole city of 600,000+ people (Fresno, CA). People still Uturn there all the time and I have had several close calls because of it. I pondered the exact thing you did, thinking "next idiot who flips a U-turn in front of me there I am gonna just plow his ass and get a nice fat check.
If you cause the accident, the insurance company will be yours, and your rates will go up. Maybe not with the first one, but they’ll go up.
If you let people hit you and it happens more than once (okay, well, more than twice), again, the insurance company will take a harder look at it. If you’re lucky enough to get hit by people who don’t have the same insurance company, I think they still probably have some database that they share within the whole industry.
All in all, not a good idea (particularly the part about hitting other people).
I once worked for a lawyer who had a client who got rear-ended five times within about a year and a half. Something was wrong with that lady’s driving, and all the insurance companies knew it.
How do you plan to do this? I really doubt you can deliberately get into accidents repeatedly and have them all classified as not your fault.
What do you plan to do if you get injured doing this? That happens in car accidents, you know. Getting injured can be really, really expensive, not to mention painful.
In my brief sojourn into the world of insurance in the 90s, my main contribution as a software developer was to integrate our new internal claims system with a cross-industry fraud detection service.
We would export a fixed number of fields in a relatively standard format, and later on that day they would send us back a similar file that had all of the hits with potential fraudulent claims, matched on dozens of different criteria with various algorithms. They provided us with the claim information from the competitors who also had a similar claim.
For example, if someone were to file a slip-and-fall claim with State Farm and then with Allstate, the claims would be matched up on any number of criteria (e.g. names, SSN, phone numbers, location of incident), and the adjusters at both companies would be provided the information. They could then investigate deeper and decide if fraud had indeed taken place.
There were dozens, if not hundreds, of hits coming in every day. I suspect these days it would be forbidden for developers to peruse the production data, for privacy reasons, but back then it was fun reading.
That was fifteen years ago. I’m sure that these cross-industry fraud detection services have improved in the intervening years.
Just make sure you claim the excess insurance reimbursements as income on your income taxes. No point in going to jail for reckless driving AND tax evasion.
Okay. We’ll ignore the morality. Instead, we’ll just look at the fact that you are potentially endangering other people’s lives. Legally, you could be charged with reckless driving, reckless endangerment, and if you’re doing it on purpose and someone dies, a whole lot worse than that.
You could also find yourself facing massive problems with insurance fraud, making yourself uninsurable in the future and possibly looking at fines and/or jail time. All in all, a really really bad idea.
I figure you just wait until someone tailgates you and hit the brakes. The law is very clear: You have to keep enough distance to the car in front of you so you can safely stop. So the car that rear ends another car is always at fault. It doesn’t matter why the person in front stops.
So if you do this once a week I guess the other drivers insurance companies can investigate all they want, it is still the fault of the car that hits from the rear. There’s no law that says you can’t apply your brakes.
Given that the actions proposed in the OP are at best fraudulent and at worst illegal, I’m going to close this thread. Soliciting advice on how to evade the law or on how to scam people (or companies) is not appropriate for this forum (or any other forum on this board).