We get bizarre insurance claims relating to collision damage to rental cars we cover. Professional integrity prevents us from disclosing details, but when it comes to other forms of insurance, we are free to reveal the secrets we discovered on the web. You can decide for yourself which of these stories are true. At the very least, we can have a good laugh at other people’s imagination.
The Best of All Bizarre Insurance Claims
A certain lady in Philadelphia turned slip-and-fall claims at supermarkets into an art. She successfully sued insurance companies for bogus injuries 49 times. Her total take before they caught her was over $500,000. We wonder if she slipped and fell while in prison for four years, and whether she lodged any bizarre insurance claims there.
There is a persistent story doing the rounds of a cattle farmer in Devon, England, who mislaid his phone in the dark while using it as a flashlight to deliver a calf. The rain was pelting down and he thought nothing more about it. When he found it in the field in the morning, he could see it had been through an experience. The insurance company paid out, because there was more than water damage.
A lawyer in North Carolina purchased a box of costly cigars he insured against storm damage, flood, and fire. A month later, he made a claim because the cigars were lost ‘in a series of small fires’. The insurance company decided he had smoked the cigars and repudiated. The Court rejected this because the policy did not define what constituted an ‘acceptable fire’.
A woman in Australia put in a damage claim late December for a dented auto hood. She claimed a Christmas tree flew off the roof of a car coming the other way that never stopped. She ended up in a ditch and was shaken but not harmed. The police told her to keep the tree as compensation. This proved to be the dealmaker for her bizarre claim.
An incident in Delaware concerning loss of a house and an auto, qualifies as the most hilarious of all the bizarre insurance claims we found. The fellow said his wood stove ignited setting fire to two buckets of coal standing nearby. He tripped over one in a panic and it landed on the couch. When he threw the second one out the door it landed on the rear seat of the convertible. He lost his car, his house and the three years of his life he spent in prison.
There is an Easier Way to Make Insurance Claims
Bonzah offers dependable rental car damage protection: So you don’t have to go to these extremes when you have a genuine claim, and we are with you all the way too.
Image: Herd of Cows: Oskar Karlin BY CC 2.0