False insurance claim for an accident I didn't have!?

September 29, 2010 11:34 AM

I just got a call from my insurance company telling me that someone had filed a claim against me for an accident I didn't have! They seemed to believe me when I said I didn't have an accident and are forwarding it to central claims. I'll hopefully get a call from them this afternoon with more information. Does this happen a lot? How would someone get enough information about me to file an insurance claim against me?
posted by chrispederick to Travel & Transportation (3 answers total)

I work at a hospital billing office, and I file personal injury claims for patients on their auto insurance when they don't do it themselves. I have also filed claims when the patient is not the policyholder (say, he got hit by a car and we know who the driver was and what the auto insurance is). A lot of times I don't have a policy number, so they make me do a lot of demographics checks (name, address, dob) to make sure it's the right person. It's possible something similar happened and the insurance company picked the wrong policy?

Surprisingly, an insurance company will let me file a claim and then I'll get a call back later saying "this person doesn't have a policy with us". So my feeling is that your insurance company might have dealt with this kind of thing before, which is why they may not have given you a hard time.
posted by DrGirlfriend at 11:46 AM on September 29, 2010

This kind of happened to my parents. They received a letter in the mail informing them of a claim made against them - except, as in your case, there hadn't been any accident. Turns out there was a mis-read license plate involved, and a couple of phone calls later, once the insurance agency determined that the descriptions of the driver and vehicle in question were nowhere near a match, it was all cleared up.
posted by alynnk at 11:54 AM on September 29, 2010

I had a similar situation where an eyewitness saw a car that looked like mine involved in a hit and run in the parking lot at work. My insurance company handled most of the negotiations, although I did have to take my car in for an inspection at an auto body place to look for any matching damage. In the end it went away without too much trouble.
posted by doctord at 9:45 AM on September 30, 2010