INSURANCE FRAUD 1: FAKED DEATH

Insurance fraud is a crime being committed every day. All over the world, some sinister people believed insurance money are free money which can be picked at will through their concoction of a plan. While some of the perpetrators are caught, some escaped with the compensation undetected. But no matter what, crime doesn’t pay. In whatever form, either big or small, a crime is a crime and a criminal is a criminal.

This is a real life story of one of the highest life insurance crime ever perpetrated.

Sunn-ke (not the real name) was an Asian beautician by profession. She was around 28 years old, married with 2 children; she had a biological mother who was 49 years old. One day, an insurance salesman came up to Sunn-ke and advised her about Insurance. Based on this, she took an Endowment Life Assurance worth of one million dollars for her mother and half the amount for herself. Then, she continued paying the premium on a monthly basis.

After two years of paying the premiums regularly, she concocted a trick on how she could dupe the insurer of the sum assured.

First, she took her mother out of the country under a false identity to her uncle in United States of America. Then, she came back and announced to the people that her mum had died. What baffled everybody was that she placed an obituary in the popular newspaper and got a death certificate on behalf of her mother’s death. She then took all this to her insurer.

The people at the insurance company were surprised at this occurrence. They sent some people to visit and console Sunn-ke’s family but on getting there, they met the house door locked and upon enquiring from the neighbours, they were surprised when they tried to condole with the neighbours and were met with scornful eyes. When they asked one of the neighbours when the woman died, he said he had no idea of the woman’s death and that he saw the woman went out with the daughter, dressed in a travelling mood, and she never came back to the house.

This piece of information got the insurance people suspicious. Then, they sent two of their special investigators to unravel the matter. The insurance investigators went to the Sunn-ke’s mother’s village. On getting there, the interviewed elders were surprised at the news of the woman and they told them that they were just hearing of it. The whole village was immediately thrown into a state of mourning.

The insurance investigators, on getting back, asked Sunn-ke where her mother’s corpse was and when she told them that she had been buried, they asked her why she had to do that without informing the village elders of the woman’s death. She replied them that it was her mother’s last request that she should be buried immediately she died as she would not want any native rite performed on her dead body. However, when they asked her to take them to the burial site, she told them that she wouldn't be able to do that right away and gave them an appointment for the third day.

Some people are so desperate and, evil begets evil, likes begets likes. A dubious action is a chain networking which one crime perpetrated has to be covered up with another criminal action, which in turn needs to be protected from being discovered and has to be covered up with another dubious action, and so on and so forth.

The moment Sunn-ke discovered that her trick was about to be investigated to the core, she went to the burial site and arranged with some people working there. What they did was to get a fresh female corpse of the right age and buried it, after which they arranged for a decent tombstone to be erected on the grave. All this was done in the dead of night to avoid any prying witness.

On the third day, the investigators went with Sunn-ke to verify the burial point of her mother. They noticed a freshly-prepared tomb, when they commented on this Sunn-ke told them that she just did that because she just had sufficient fund to do it.

Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. The insurance investigators gave their report to their office in which they suggested in exhuming the corpse for final verification. True to the point, they got permission from the appropriate authority and exhumed the corpse and saw the decaying corpse. But what disturbed the investigation was that they could not do any form of identification such as facial, dental etc. Why? The corpse was already decaying beyond the point of recognition and the local woman never visited a dentist for any dental problem; so there was no dental history.

Since it has been verified that the woman was dead by exhuming the body, the insurance had no choice except to pay the complete compensation of sum assured to the woman.

After the compensation had been paid, the top management body of the insurance organization held a meeting and gave the two insurance investigators the mandate to continue their investigation until they were fully satisfied.

Right now, Sunn-ke was at peace of mind that her plot had succeeded without knowing that her phones, shop and house had been electronically bugged by the insurance investigators to eavesdrop on her conversations.

The first breakthrough was when she phoned her uncle in the United States of America. While talking to her uncle, she asked about her mum. 

 
About three days after, she went to a phone booth and discussed with a distant caller. This, after checking through, was discovered to be the same number she used to call her uncle in United States of America. This led to greater suspicion on this case. Why did she had to go and call outside by using public telephone booth and refuse to use her phones? Who is she calling to? What is the content of the conversation?

The next thing the insurance investigators did was to bug all the public telephones within the vicinity of the one Sunn-ke used the other time. Luck was on their side because she made the same long distance call again within a week of this bugging by using the same phone booth and they were able to record the conversation and discovered that the person at the other end was her mother – the supposed dead woman whose assurance sum-assured had been paid.

The insurance investigators gave the full report to the management – all the recorded conversations, the traced address in USA where Sunn-ke was making telephone call to her mother.

The situation turned to an international crime because Sunn-ke’s uncle had a hand in the affairs; he was the one who cooked up the plot right from the beginning before they took the insurance policy. All of them had to be rounded up and dealt with according to the law.

However, the woman never knew the type of game she was being used for by her biological daughter. Neither did she know that she had been proclaimed dead nor had any knowledge that a tombstone had been erected on her behalf while she was still alive and kicking.

This is the extent to which some dark-hearted people could go for money’s sake. Insurance organisations lose billions of dollars annually through insurance fraud. Some people had turned it into some kind of game in duping insurance organizations, they always believed that they can go scot-free but most of them are usually caught in the end no matter how near-perfect the plot may be.

Authored by David Mog on GOARTICLES.COM