I’d put this in the pit, but I’m too drained to be properly angry. I just found out that the woman with whom I was involved in a car accident LIED to her insurance company about what happened.
On September 10th as I was pulling into a parking lot, the car in front of me suddenly stopped, leaving me in half-turn in the road. Suddenly, the car started backing up! I hit my horn but it was too late. My car was crunched in the front. Her car was fine. We exchange information, and then I immediately go and file a report with my insurance company over the phone.
Now almost two months later I find out that her insurance company is denying the claim because she told them that she was rear-ended by me!!!
So I’m now trying to get the case into arbitration, because - get this - apparently she made the statement to my insurance company that she DID back into me and it was her fault. If arbitration doesn’t work I’m going after her in small claims court. I may go after her in small claims court anyway.
This totally sucks. SHE hit ME. My car was damaged. I was injured. I paid a $500 deductible. And she thinks she can just walk away, scott-free? I’m not going to let that happen.
I can’t believe the ethics of some people!!! She had to LIE!?!? Am I naive to be astounded by this?
Well, yeah. For the most part (unfortunately) people just plain suck. I don’t think we’ll ever truly outgrow our baser animal instincts, though. shrug
Any witnesses? I’d start rounding them up now, if I were you.
Happens ALL the time. Happened to me twice. Like Q.E.D. said, some people just suck. Don’t let them turn you into one of them.
No witnesses. Her word against mine. Lucky for me she seems to have changed her story at least once while mine has remained rock steady since day 1.
I have her name, address and phone number. She will pay, one way or another. $500, bitch. NOW.
I was rearended by a guy in a rental car a week ago. Totally his fault but he was nice enough that he got on his cell phone and called the cops for us. I’m currently dealing with Hertz to see if they’ll pay for the repairs. The guy’s insurance rep also wants a look at the damage. Reparis are in the neighborhood of $4500 according to one body shop I went to.
Is filing a false report a crime? If so, it might be worth getting copies of all four reports (yours to her company and your own; hers to your company and her own) and taking them to the police station, seeing if they’re willing to have an officer swing by her house and be stern with her.
I had something similar happen to me awhile ago, in which a company truck backed into me in the middle of the street. I called the cops, and the teenage driver lied to the cops about what happened. I had absolutely no money at the time, and so I wrote letters and called the guy’s company about every other day for two weeks until the company convinced the kid to fess up and got the insurance company to reimburse me. It was awful, but eventually I got justice.
Daniel
We were involved with an uninsured driver in an accident that was OBVIOUSLY her fault, simply by way of where she hit us (rear quarter panel). She has no money, no insurance and no hopes of getting either. Yes, we could have taken off work, taken her to court, hired lawyers, ad nauseum…because we were right, but we would have lost in the long run anyway. Once you get over your initial pissedoffedness, you may come to accept the fact that some people suck. However, you do have the “switched statement” thing in your corner, so it may be worth pursuing it a little.
I scratched a woman’s car in a parking lot once, felt horrible about it, so I left a note with my phone number and everything. She calls while I’m out and leaves an incomprehensible message, speaking too fast for me to get her name or number even after repeated listenings. I figure she’ll call back. A couple weeks later, she calls, telling me she went to the police to file a report a week ago, called me from the police station but didn’t bother to leave a message. My mom sees I’m distressed (near tears, dammit), so she grabs the phone and calmly asks for two estimates, and if they’re reasonable, we wouldn’t go through insurance. Month and half passes and we finally get one estimate in the mail, for $1000 dollars because she’s now claiming I shattered her bumper and broke a tail light. All I did was two, 6-inch scratches on the side of her car! (Shoulda had a camera, I know.) The same day the estimate arrives, my mom gets a call from her mom (both of us being in our early 20s, for the record) ranting about how we’ve been too slow getting the money (clearly her daughter’s fault!) and that she was filing a report on my mom! My mom pointed out that we had just received the first estimate, would wait till we got the second one from our repair place, and then decide what to do. The other mother threw a hissy fit, and so we decided to go to our insurance people, who just love me to death because I did the right thing. Then, when I move down to NC and need to get new insurance, they want to charge me double because my old insurance people made a mistake and said there was bodily harm in the accident (she wasn’t even in the car at the time!), but that luckily got straightened out.
Eh, long story short, next time I’m using a fake number. Grrr.
Ah, insurance fraud! Such fun…
Yonks ago some dimwit tried to get me to pony up for the “damage” I inflicted on his beatermobile. He stopped short and my brakes were kind of soft and I tapped him. Nimrod called the cops. Then later that night he called trying to get me to bring wads of cash to some street corner in exchange for not contacting my insurance company. Oh yes please, let me meet a stranger on some dark street with merry bushels of cash! Too bad for him that the police he insisted on calling noted on their report that there was no damage done to his car other than some rubber transfer from mine to his. He gave up after one more extortion attempt. Scumbag.
The same thing in reverse happened to a cow-orker of mine. He got into this second accident in three months, and swore the other driver was at fault. The other driver and five witnesses swore he was the cause of the accident, but he insisted they were all lying. The police officer stated the cars had been moved, but it looked like cow-orker had cause the accident from the damage involved. So the cop was lying too.
In this case, let your insurance company handle your damages for you. You will need to eat your deductible initially. Once you’ve been paid, your insurance company will send her or her insurance the bill. They will do this because she admitted to your company that she was at fault–they have no reason to believe otherwise. In addition to collecting the money they paid you, your company will recoup your deductible and forward that to you. In the end you are out nothing.
The funny thing is witnesses come out of the woodwork when you don’t need them. I was driving along a frontage road once when some old guy pulled onto the road and immediately cut across four lanes to get to the onramp and would have pulled right into me. Would have, but I had seen him approaching the road earlier and thought to myself that this guy might do something stupid. When he did do something stupid, I was ready, and was able to break (mostly) in time. I did end up giving him a slight “nudge”, though, so we both stopped and BAM the person behind me stopped also and gave me her card and said she saw the whole thing.
However, it turned out there was no damage to either car, so I just told the old guy to freakin’ be more careful next time and look already.
The witness was outraged that I didn’t press charges or something and drove off disgusted.
Oh argh, I hate this kind of thing! Once when I was in college I was pulling in to the parking lot at the last minute before I had to get to class for a calculus test. The lot was pretty full, but there was a space next to a car that was pulled in kinda cattywampus. I was driving a tiny car, so I went ahead and took the space, but when I got out I thought to myself that the other car was kinda close, so I took the precaution of writing down the license plate number, the school parking permit number and taking a pic of the two cars (showing mine parked correctly in the space and the other car parked stupidy outside the lines) with my digital camera. Sure enough, when I get out of school the space next to me is empty, theres a foot long scratch down my rear quarter panel and no note on my windshield, quelle surprise! So I reported it to campus security, they told me they’d be in touch after informing the other party, and I called my insurance company to let them know what had happened and gave them the number of campus security to get the info on the other driver. So far, so good.
Then I get a call from the father of the owner of the other car. He comes on all heavy, makes sure to let me know from upfront that he’s a sheriff’s deputy and starts asking me (in a very bullying manner) why I had all the info on his kid’s car, and why did I take a picture? I told him that I figured any idiot who was too stupid to be able to pull into a parking space would probably be too stupid to get it out again without hitting someone so it seemed like a good idea, and sure enough my hunch had paid off. He then attempted to insinuate that I had in some way SET UP his kid to hit my car so I could make a claim against him, and my patience evaporated. I proceeded to tell him that A) it was incredibly inappropriate for him to contact me directly and that in future all communication must be made with my insurance company, B) that it was even more inappropriate to use his position as a police officer to attempt to intimidate me, and that C) it was pretty fucking obvious where his kid got his stupidity, cavalier attitude toward the rights of others and the morals which allowed him to leave the scene of an accident without leaving his information. I hung up on the fucker while he was still spluttering, immediately called the sheriff’s department and reported him for his behavior, and never heard another word from the jerk again. I got the check for the damage from my insurance company, and used it to finance a very fun trip to Europe.
Keep plugging, sometimes it all pays off!