Family flood fraud rumbled
A FRAUDULENT claim for € 250,000 in compensation for damage caused by devastating floods in September 2019 has been rumbled by the Guardia Civil.
A force spokesman explained they have arrested four people and are investigating a fifth in the Vega Baja area municipality of Rafal.
Victims of the floods made claims for injuries or material losses from their insurance companies, which were then paid by the insurance compensation consortium, a governmentowned business responsible for extraordinary events of this nature.
At the end of 2019, a company in the Vega Baja lodged a
claim for € 250,000, saying it had lost 200,000 kilos of merchandise it had stored in a warehouse, including lemons and potatoes, 3,000 wooden crates and 1,000 pallets.
The consortium valued the damages at only € 160,000 and the victims requested an adGuardia vance of € 100,000, supposedly to address the precarious situation of their business. Once the claim had been processed and the damages paid in full, a subsequent check of the documentation found some suspicious inconsistencies.
They reported it to the Civil in July and officers studied the documentation in detail.
The investigation concluded that the damaged fruit and veg, cases and pallets had not existed, and the estimates and invoices had been falsified.
The claimants even used their own company’s registration numbers to fake purchases of the merchandise, proving that it never existed.
The five suspects had also divided the insurance payout evenly between them.
The Guardia Civil arrested three men aged between 22 and 60 and a woman aged 58, and are investigating another woman, 44, all of whom are Spanish.