What punishment can I face for insurance fraud?

Different types of penalties for committing insurance fraud

There are many consequences associated with committing insurance fraud. It does depend on the form, severity and size of the fraud. Insurance fraud which is committed on a large scale is punished more severely than lying about data on an application. Insurance fraud can cause the following consequences:

No claims payment

The insurance company will no longer pay out money to you if it is determined that fraud has been committed by you. It is usually the case that insurers choose to stop paying out your submitted claim even if you have only committed a small amount of fraud, for example, by reporting a cell phone in the claim after a burglary when the phone was not actually stolen. If the insurer notices that you are committing fraud and can establish this, it may refuse to pay out the claim, which therefore also means that the items actually stolen will not be reimbursed either. In the end, you are then left with higher costs than if you had simply been honest.

A fine of €532.

Anyone found to have committed insurance fraud has been subject to a standard fine of €532 since 2016. The Service Organization Direct Liability (SODA) collects this fine. This fine was created by the Insurers' Association in order to be able to crack down on and punish fraudsters even harder, and also hopes to deter potential fraudsters and thus prevent fraud.

Paying research costs yourself

However, an insurer must be able to prove a suspicion of fraud. Therefore, when fraud is suspected, an insurer almost always conducts an investigation. Sometimes the insurer may choose to have an expert or investigation firm do the investigation. This can cause very high costs. Once it is determined that fraud has occurred, the investigation costs incurred are recovered from the fraudster. This is very neat, because if you had not committed fraud, the insurer would not have had to set up an investigation.

A registration as a fraudster

While it may not seem like an immediate hefty penalty, a registration due to insurance fraud also has quite an impact when you would like to purchase new insurance in the future.
First, you will be stored by the insurer in the fraud register that each insurer maintains internally, with the goal of keeping the insurance company in question alert and preventing any further insurance from being purchased by you from the company. This fraud register is only accessible and viewable within the insurance company in question.

Then you also get a CIS registration. Whereas the internal fraud registers are solely for the insurer itself, the database of Stichting CIS is accessible to any member insurer. Stichting Centraal Informatie Systeem, or Foundation CIS, stores all data that is important to insurers, with the goal of reducing insurers' risks in applications and preventing fraud. Not only fraudsters are registered, but also defaulters and people with driving disqualifications or criminal records.

Highest penalty: denunciation

Finally, the most severe punishment for insurance fraud can also be chosen; reporting it. In practice, reporting the fraud only occurs for amounts of fraud that are very high or when it is a case of organized crime. Thus, this is mainly the more serious cases.

Do you have punishment for insurance fraud? You can still get insurance through Alpina.nl !

When you are no longer able to get another insurance from a new insurer because of insurance fraud, you can always get insurance from insurance company De Vereende through alpina.nl They are specialists in insuring special cases. Online you can very easily calculate the premiums for insurance with De Vereende.