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Committing
insurance fraud is bad, but killing pets for insurance money? Now that's
surely a crime deserving the deepest circle of Hell.
The bad news is that fraudulent claims on pet insurance policies are on the rise in the UK:
First it was spurious claims for whiplash and other injuries, then it was "crash for cash". Now a new type of fraud is affecting the insurance industry - pet scams.
Dishonest claims on animal policies almost quadrupled last year, making it the fasting growing area of insurance crime.
Figures from the Association of British Insurers show there was £1,929,900 worth of pet insurance fraud detected last year – up from just £420,000 in 2009. [...]
Insurers believe frauds include owners getting rid of the animal - by selling it or even killing it - then claiming a payout for early death. The animal may never have existed in the first place.
You probably already know that a lot of celebrities are vain, but it’s hard to tell just how self-obsessed some people are until you learn how much they are willing to insure their own bod parts for. Mariah Carey, for example, has her legs insured for $1 billion dollars.
I’ve always wondered though if an insured celebrity gets fat, does that enable them to collect insurance money?
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
A dark tale from our “Dustbin of Gruesome History” files.
THE DISCOVERY
One the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm’s owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness’s children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult- the body’s head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere’s trial was over, he would be little more than a sidebar in what is still one of the most horrible crime stories in American history …and an unsolved mystery.
BACKGROUND
Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to “Belle.” In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle’s life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898, that house burned down, and another insurance payout allowed the couple to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor’s autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner’s investigation eventually deemed the death to be “of natural causes,” and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy a farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death -and insurance money- to come.
MORE SUSPICIONS
In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness’s infant daughter died while left alone with Belle… and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5’8″, weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband’s head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle’s 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died.”
Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner’s jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent -and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.
more …
During the Apollo space program, astronauts were apparently ineligible for traditional life insurance. So they and NASA came up with an innovative solution.
The answer was provided by NASA in the form of ‘Insurance Covers’, as seen here, a number of which were given to every crew member and subsequently signed by every astronaut involved, as close to launch as possible. Its value would instantly be high, but would no doubt sky-rocket (no pun intended) should the astronauts never return; the deceased’s surviving family then at least safe in the knowledge that in future they could cash-in their makeshift insurance policy if required.
Link (with photos of two additional covers). Via Reddit.
First I laughed, then I cried in horror because I suddenly realized these people drive on the same roads as the rest of us. From Miss Cellania:
These are statements from insurance forms where car drivers tried to summarize accident details in as few words as possible. Such instances of faulty writing serve to confirm that incompetency can be highly entertaining.
1. Coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.
2. The other car collided with mine without giving warning of its intent.
3. I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way.
4. In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.
5. I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision and I did not see the other car.
Unemployed and uninsured, 41-year-old Kathy Myers couldn’t afford to get her injured shoulder treated, so she came up with a radical plan: she shot herself to get free medical care!
Kathy Myers’ troubles started when her 80-lb Golden Lab yanked on his leash during a skirmish with her Chihuahuas. The big dog yanked Myer’s shoulder as well, injuring her rotator cuff.
After a month of agonizing pain, the unemployed 41-year-old used her in-laws’ gun to take matters into her own hands. She placed icepacks and pillows around her head and neck, and then pulled the trigger, according to Wood TV 8 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Myers says she made a rational choice: she had hoped that the doctors who mended her flesh wound would also fix her rotator cuff.
Alas, the plan backfired:
Last Thursday doctors treated the bullet wound, but instead of fixing her injured shoulder, they gave her some antiinflammatory drugs and sent her home.
Though shooting yourself to get medical care may seem a bit extreme, Myers told reporters at WSBT-TV in South Bend, Ind., that she has no "suicide wish" and that she "wants to live" despite her problems.
And her problems may only be increasing. Besides being in even greater pain, Myers might have to go before a judge to face a charge of firing a weapon within city limits.
Aina Hunter of CBS News has more: Link (Photo: CBS)
If you’re caught jumping the turnstiles or sneaking through the exit barriers on the Paris Metro, you’ll face fines up to $60. Sacrebleu!
Subway freeloaders have banded together to come up with the perfectly logical solution: a scofflaw insurance fund!
The answer, here in the land that gave the world the motto "All for one, one for all," is as typically French as it is ingenious: They’ve banded together to set up what are, essentially, scofflaw insurance funds, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary fervor.
For about $8.50 a month, those who join one of these raffish-sounding mutuelles des fraudeurs can rest easy knowing that, if they get busted for refusing to be so bourgeois as to pay to use public transit, the fund will cough up the money for the fine.
It provides a little peace of mind, however ethically dubious, in a time of economic uncertainty.
But for many of these fraudeurs, cheating the system and forming a co-op isn’t just about saving money; it’s about striking a blow against a capitalist state that favors the haves over the have-nots. Fare dodgers of the world, unite!
Henry Chu of LA Times Column One has the story: Link
Sure you can insure your house, car, precious artwork … but how about taste buds? Turns out that you CAN insure parts of your anatomy, especially when those parts generate income. For example:
John Harrison
No wonder he’s smiling. John Harrison is, and has been for many years, the official ice cream taster at Dreyer’s Ice Cream and on a daily basis approves or rejects ice cream according to its many different varieties of flavour, colour and texture. It’s a difficult job but someone’s got to do it, and that someone just happens to be John, a man who uses a gold spoon (there’s no aftertaste) to judge ice cream in order to pay the bills. Unsurprisingly, his taste buds are insured for £700,000.
More about the strange world of taste insurance: Link | John Harrison’s website at Dreyer’s – Thanks Dave!
According
to a survey of accident claims by Churchill Car Insurance, computers aren't
the only thing computer programmers engineers like to crash - they are also likely
to crash their cars ...
Here are the 10 "most likely to crash" occupations:
1. Computer engineer
2. Sales manager
3. Chef
4. Student
5. Doctor
6. Estate agent
7. Surveyor
8. Customer adviser
9. Hairdresser
10. Social workerIn contrast, farmers had the best road safety records based on claims made, followed by aircraft fitters, stores personnel and ambulance drivers.
That reminded me of the classic programmer joke ... from Stack Overflow:
A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.
The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed".
The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong".
The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"
Don’t you hate it when your vacation is spoiled by rain? Now, there’s something you can do about it: buy a bad weather insurance …
The insurance policy, launched by holiday groups Pierre et Vacances and FranceLoc, will allow holiday-makers to claim back part of the cost of their trip if they suffer at least four days of rain in any one week.
"Aon France allows Pierre & Vacances to propose its clients with automatic reimbursement for part of their stay…if weather conditions don’t meet expectations," the holiday group said in a statement.
Aon France will use satellite photos obtained by the French weather bureau to calculate how much money subcribers should receive.
Insurance fraud is not new, but this one is unusual: "necro-phonies" Faye Shilling and Jane Crump will be arraigned on charges of staging fake funerals for fake people to defraud insurance companies!
When staging the funerals, Shilling, a phlebotomist, and Crump, an employee at a now-defunct Long Beach mortuary, allegedly filled caskets with various materials to make it appear they contained actual corpses, documents show.
After the funerals, the women and their associates filed bogus documents with the county saying the remains had been cremated and scattered at sea, prosecutors said.
The insurance policies were worth $50,000 to $450,000, and the women had already collected on some as large as $250,000, officials said.
Forget the Year of the Ox, according to Bruce Sterling of Seed Magazine, 2009 is the Year of the Panic. He lists 7 reasons why; for example, let’s take look at insurance:
4. Insurance and building codes. Every year, insurance rates soar from mounting "natural" catastrophes, obscuring the fact that the planet’s coasts are increasingly uninsurable.
Insurance underlies the building and construction trades. If those rates skyrocket, that system must keel over. Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance?—?because insurance can’t be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions?—?we’ll find ourselves living in a Planet of Slums.
Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. They live in "informal architecture," i.e., slum structures. Barrios. Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go.
Unless they’re American, in which case they’ll live in their cars.
But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they have no fixed address? Besides, car companies are coming apart with the sudden savage ease of Enron’s collapse. Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.
