I remember a minor accident I got into with someone where she went to a hospital and accused me of giving her whiplash and wanted take me to court.
I was moving at an ants crawl when I ran into her and it was physically impossible for her to have been injured. There were lies on the police report that could have gotten me sent to jail. I hired a lawyer and he got me out of trouble. I wanted to have her arrested for trying to sue me under false pretenses but I was told this would cost more money.
After this I learned of people who go out looking for accidents where they might be able to sue someone to get money.
I was curious if anyone here has had similar things happen to them.
Normally, if you have a car accident, you notify your insurance company and they deal with the claim, including hiring an attorney to defend the insured in a civil lawsuit for damages if needed. The OP may have hired an attorney to defend a traffic ticket arising out of the accident, but if there was actually information in the police report that could have sent the OP to jail, the investigating officer probably would have arrested him at the scene. So far as I know, it is not possible to have some arrested for “trying to sue under false pretenses” (whatever that may mean) for any amount of money.
Well, perjury is a felony in most places, and trying to sue would involve a sworn statement, so I suppose you could theoretically be arrested for that.
In most jurisdictions, you don’t need to swear anything to issue and serve civil proceedings. The swearing comes later, when the issue is tried - if things get to that point. Issuing proceedings which include pleas that you are later unable to establish in evidence is not perjury.
Things have gotten so bad in Russia that I am told that everyone who has a car there also has a dash cam. That’s why there are so many funny Russian dash cam videos on YouTube.
Maybe I am seeing too many sensationalized stories, but I am starting to think that maybe dash cams should be a standard feature of American cars, too.
I’m surprised by that…surprised that in the US dash cams are rare enough that it’s considered odd that most or all russians have them.
Dash cams cost pocket-change to buy now, and can help clarify incidents where fault is difficult to ascertain (even in the absence of “suing artists” this is a common occurrence).
Plus just an extra set of eyes. Maybe you just see some crime or accident and can help the police later?
I travel a lot and I thought they were popular everywhere. I’ll have a look out next time I’m in the US.
That may vary from place to place and from one type of case to another. For example, the official form for a small-claims petition in Kansas courts must be sworn before a notary or certain other officials (“I hereby swear that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the foregoing claim asserted against the defendant (including the estimate of value of any property sought to be recovered) is a just and true statement, exclusive of any valid claim or defense which defendant may have.”)
Really good for meteor strikes, UFO sightings, and bigfoot, too!
I invented a “legal proof” device I’d like to see: four spray-paint tubes, pointing downward, just inside the centerline of the car’s four wheels. If there’s an impact, the paint tubes spray for exactly one second.
This would be useful to show, in court, that my car was (or was not) on my side of the double yellow line, or in my own traffic lane, etc. Also, the exact one-second spray would show how fast I was going. Nowadays, they do a lot of this with tire skid-marks, but my device would be closer to exact.
I was once targeted by the old pull in front of a guy, slam your brakes, collect serious damage money, give all your money to the lawyer scams. I got lucky. Driving down the 5, coming out of the valley, left lane, as fast as the prevailing madness, a car, filled with a family of desperate, willing to risk their lives for a few measly bucks idiots maneuvered their car in front of mine, in the far left lane and stomped on their brakes. I watch everything, and I watched them pull in front of me, but I wasn’t expecting that. I stood on my brakes, trusting in my Ranger, and went full Fred Flintstone on them and stopped that puppy with my feet. They immediately slithered back to the right shoulder to get over what could have killed them. No money this time guys. Got enough nerve to try it again?
I remember reading about a rash of whiplash suits by scam artists in Seattle back in the 90s. They would pull the stunt at on ramps when traffic was heavy and the ramp was congested. As the car in front (the scammer) was set to accelerate and join traffic, he would watch the rear view mirror. The car behind would naturally start to accelerate when the car in front of him took off, then he would look to the traffic he was about to merge with and take his eyes off the car in front of him. When the scammer saw him look away, he would slam on the brakes and bam-o instant whiplash. Nevermind the speeds of these accidents were about walking speed. The scammer always got out of the car holding his neck and moaning in pain.
I wonder how frequently this still works in this day and age. Insurance companies are always getting better at fraud detection and I would think a person or even a network of people constantly getting into fender benders would trigger some red flags.
Well I live in the US and I have one, mounted in front of the rear view mirror, you probably wouldn’t notice it, or think that it is a radar detector.
It takes excellent 135 degree, high quality color videos and sound in clips of about 5 minutes each. The number of video clips it will store depends on the size of the SD card you put in. Mine holds several days of my normal driving. If the card gets full it just keeps going by over writing the oldest clip. If you want to keep a video you just take the SD card out and put it into your home computer or device and transfer the clip from the card to computer.
It also records the time, date, and uses GPS to display and record my speed on the video. When the GPS no longer detects movement for a few minutes it goes into Parking Mode. In this mode it records in a continuous loop but doesn’t store it or use SD storage space until it detects an “event”. Any slight movement of the car in Parking Mode triggers an event. Then it goes back 20 seconds before the event was detected and stores the whole thing.
So if someone is walking up to your car to vandalize it the camera will record the person approaching the car and what happens next. Or if a car backs into you in a parking lot you will see all the action leading up to the bump. I just leave mine on whenever the car leaves its garage and forget it, it doesn’t use enough juice to put any drain on the car battery.
Mine wasn’t cheap but like anything else, you get what you pay for. $400 Lukas ARA.
And back to the subject of the OP, I think that US insurance companies will eventually offer a coverage discount for dash cameras. I know that my insurance company would be very pleased if I brought in a video of any accident I was in.
Cheap insurance. You can get a dashcam (with memory card) for as little as $50. It’s the sort of thing that can prove that the pedestrian you hit really was crossing against the light and popped out from behind another vehicle when she violated your right-of-way - or it can show who was moving/accelerating which way in the moments before an impact. It’s good defense against shitty recall, and excellent defense against scammers who are trying to make a quick buck off of you.
