Would you lie on your insurance claim to reduce the price? If you said yes, you aren’t alone. Surprisingly, about a third of people surveyed admitted to lying to their insurers. So, if everybody’s doing it and paying less, shouldn’t you be doing it to? It would be great if you could just make up a load of information and get cheap insurance without any repercussions, but you can’t. If you’re still thinking of trying to lie on your insurance claim, these are the reasons that you shouldn’t.
They Will Find Out
You might think that you’re being really clever but when you lie, the chances are that the insurance company is going to find out. Any kind of driving conviction is going to make your insurance shoot up so it’s tempting to just leave that bit out of your application. It’s illegal to do that so if you get found out, you’re going to be getting charged with fraud. The thing is, it’s pretty easy to find out. There are DUI Record Search websites online where anybody can easily find out if you’ve had a conviction for drunk driving in the past. It’s just as easy for the insurance company to find out if you’ve got speeding tickets or parking violations and you can be sure that they’ll check those.
The Lie Will Get Bigger
People think that you just tell a white lie on the application and that’s the end of it. But those lies will come back to haunt you later on if you need to make a claim. Say you’ve lied about parking your car inside a garage instead of out on the street. You’re less likely to have the car stolen from inside a garage so it’ll cost you less to insure, but what happens if your car does actually get stolen. You’ll have to lie again and say that it was stolen from inside the garage, otherwise, you won’t get a payout. That’s a serious fraud and it means having to tell another load of lies or admitting you were fraudulent on the application. Are you going to fake a break in on your garage, if you even have one, or are you going to own up to the lie? Either way, you’re in big trouble.
One of the most common ways that people get found out is ‘forgetting’ to add drivers to the policy when they’re using the car. If they aren’t insured and they hit somebody, you either tell the insurance company that they were driving uninsured which will make it harder for them to get cheap insurance, or you lie and say somebody else was. The more lies you end up piling on, the worse it’ll be when you inevitably get rumbled.
When the insurance company find out, they aren’t obliged to pay for your repairs, or any of the cars that you hit. That means you’ll be footing the bill for all of that, and they’ll probably cancel your policy as well. So, instead of having your repairs covered, you end up paying everybody’s and buying a new car insurance policy. Doesn’t sound like you’re saving money to me.
It Makes It More Expensive For Everybody
Insurance companies lose a lot of money every year because of fraudulent claims and it’s one of the reasons that prices are so high in the first place. Figures from 2008 estimated that insurance companies lost $15.9 billion to lies on insurance claims and applications. To make up for that shortfall they’ve started increasing their prices. If you lie, you’re adding to that problem and making the prices go up year on year so the saving that you made last year by lying is now cancelled out by your increased rate this year.
Bending The Truth
While you can’t lie outright on your insurance claim to reduce the cost, you can bend the truth in a few ways. There are some pieces of information on the application that you can change in order to reduce the price without actually lying. When it comes to putting your job description in, you pay different prices depending on how you phrase it. If you write chef, for example, you’ll pay more than kitchen technician. This is actually a legitimate way of bending the truth to reduce your bill because you aren’t actually lying.
There are ways that you can cut your insurance bill but lying isn’t one of them. It’s’ just going to land you in a whole lot of trouble and cost you more money in the long run when you fail to make a successful claim.