U.S. says fraud ring that staged car crashes cost insurers $1M

The collisions often took place at night on desolate roads, investigators said: that way there would be no witnesses.

But the damage, resulting from more than a dozen car crashes in Washington state over three years and totaling nearly $1 million in false insurance claims, was no accident, according to newly unsealed federal court documents.

Some of the claimants had placed weights on car seats to get the airbags to deploy, even fastening a seatbelt around a case of bottled water, the authorities said.

They went so far as to use hammers to smash windows and sought emergency medical treatment for injuries that did not exist, the court documents said.

Twenty-three people have been charged for their roles in staging the collisions from 2017-20 and obstructing the subsequent investigation, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Washington announced last week as an 81-page indictment was unsealed in the case.

The charges included wire and mail fraud, witness tampering, attempted tampering with evidence, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and attempted obstruction of an official proceeding.

The claims were for lost wages, bodily injury and property damage, authorities said, adding that some of the defendants had fabricated their employment.

According to investigators, the conspirators calculated that they could get more money by totaling the cars and filing an insurance claim than by selling them to a used-car dealership.

“Crash it and get rid of it,” a participant in the yearslong scheme told an associate, as detailed in the court documents.

The associate concurred: “Yes, I total it, I know how to total it. I know what to do to it.”

During an investigation by the Department of Justice, authorities said, four of the defendants fabricated a story about how an FBI agent assigned to the inquiry and an informant had solicited a $22,000 bribe to make the case go away.

The 23 defendants named in the indictment live in Washington, California, Nevada, Michigan and British Columbia.

Four of the defendants were still at large.