A senior police has said that insurers are too afraid to provide the information required to stop the scams.
The lack of cooperation from insurers is now being blamed for the inability of police to be able to crack down on the personal injury insurance fraud that has exploded in Jamaica over the last few years.
The senior official said that insurers have not been giving investigators data that would be required to pursue scammers.
Senior Superintendant Radcliffe Lewis, the head of the police Traffic Division, explained that insurers have not provided the police with the data that they would need to seek out those involved in the insurance fraud so that they can be identified and apprehended. He said that “The scam is something that has been happening for a long time and we have been aware of it for more than six months now, but we are not getting cooperation from the insurance companies.”
Lewis explained that he feels the insurers are afraid to provide insurance fraud data to the police.
The insurers are afraid to place themselves – and their individual workers – at risk by providing information about the insurance fraud going on in the country, and for that reason, they have refused to cooperate. Unfortunately, this has only caused the scammers to become more successful and “the thing has taken root,” said Lewis.
He explained that the police are only limited to what they can do. When they approach the insurers and request cooperation regarding insurance fraud, if they agree, then steps can be taken to “deal with the issue”. However, when the providers refuse to cooperate in identifying the scammers by producing the necessary data, stating that they are too afraid of the potential repercussions – which could be that someone could “come shoot them” or “come and kill them”, then it creates an entirely different scenario. At that point, the police know that they won’t be able to glean any information from the insurers, making it far more difficult to achieve any real results.
This could make it very difficult to stop insurance fraud, or even to slow its progress in the country, as the scammers have essentially taken insurers hostage.
