True Crime Stories of Insurance Number 10

The Auto Fraud

Barry Zalma, Esq., CFE presents videos so you can learn how insurance fraud is perpetrated and what is necessary to deter or defeat insurance fraud. This Video Blog of True Crime Stories of Insurance Fraud with the names and places changed to protect the guilty are all based upon investigations conducted by me and fictionalized to create a learning environment for claims personnel, SIU investigators, insurers, police, and lawyers better understand insurance fraud and weapons that can be used to deter or defeat a fraudulent insurance claim.

To a person intent on perpetrating an insurance fraud two maxims become immediately clear:

Insurers don’t care.
most adjusters and investigators wouldn’t know a fraud if it presented itself to them wearing a sign saying: “I am a fraud.”

Very successful, multimillion-dollar businesses were set up with those maxims in mind.

The most successful is the automobile personal injury fraud. It exists in almost every metropolitan community. Each perpetrator of an automobile personal injury fraud varies the methodology slightly.

Rather than isolated instances of fraud they are run like a large corporate entity.

Greed and the Dishonest Lawyer

The people involved in staged automobile accident claims are usually successful until they get greedy.

Prosecutors told the press that Davis set up Total Medical Healthcare in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles under the name of his wife, Dr. Jody Hunter-Davis, as part of the scam. She, however, did not practice medicine at the clinic and was not a suspect in the case. As part of the fraud scheme, the signatures of doctors who worked part-time at the clinic were forged for inflated billings.

Davis recruited Belshaw to run a sham law practice that negotiated the fraudulent billings with insurance companies from September 1999 to April 2003.  Belshaw failed to claim any of his earning on state income tax returns from 1999 to 2001, officials with the state Franchise Tax Board said. Belshaw owes the tax board more than $31,600 in unpaid taxes, penalties, interest and the cost of the investigation, officials said. A restitution hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 12.

Had Mr. Belshaw limited the number and extent of fraudulent claims he would probably still be presenting fraudulent claim and earning a good living. Because he got greedy, because he failed to report the money he earned from his criminal activity, he is now residing in the grey bar hotel operated by the state of California and can only wear an orange jump suit.

© 2022 – Barry Zalma

Barry Zalma, Esq., CFE, now limits his practice to service as an insurance consultant specializing in insurance coverage, insurance claims handling, insurance bad faith and insurance fraud almost equally for insurers and policyholders.

He practiced law in California for more than 44 years as an insurance coverage and claims handling lawyer and more than 54 years in the insurance business.

Subscribe to “Zalma on Insurance” at https://zalmaoninsurance.locals.com/subscribe and “Excellence in Claims Handling” at https://barryzalma.substack.com/welcome.

You can contact Mr. Zalma at https://www.zalma.com, https://www.claimschool.com, [email protected] and [email protected] . Mr. Zalma is the first recipient of the first annual Claims Magazine/ACE Legend Award.

You may find interesting the podcast “Zalma On Insurance” at https://anchor.fm/barry-zalma;  you can follow Mr. Zalma on Twitter at; you should  see Barry Zalma’s videos on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysiZklEtxZsSF9DfC0Expg/featured; or videos on https://rumble.com/zalma. Go to the Insurance Claims Library – https://zalma.com/blog/insurance-claims–library/ The last two issues of ZIFL are available at https://zalma.com/zalmas-insurance-fraud-letter-2/