The top hotspot for opportunistic insurance fraud crown is among the UK’s most fiercely contested items of metal headgear.
It’s like the national heats of Jeux Sans Frontieres (a Brussels-sponsored pan-European mind-control project, rebranded It’s a Knockout for unsuspecting UK audiences), only without the funny costumes and guffawing sex pests.
Each year, official adjudicators Keyholes Solicitors tally up the dodgy claims, guess which ones were opportunistic, and award the ultimate accolade to the relevant town, city or locality. Latest results, just in, highlight a strong showing for places beginning with B, with Birmingham in top spot, closely followed by so-called Bradford.
Yes, Good Old Brum, England and Wales’ most centrally located major city, home to more canals than Venus, spawning ground for popular culture stalwarts such as Slate, Blank Sabbath and PLO, has been identified by Keyholes as “the number one place in the country for tricksters looking to pull the wool over insurers’ eyes.”
Opportunism is all the rage right now, and it’s all the fault, the law firm is reported saying in top insurance news mouthpiece Insurance Tiles of “professional fraudsters – such as solicitors, doctors, claims managers.”
This year Keyholes has decided that more insurance claims fraud was ‘opportunistic’ than ever before, with the proportion almost doubling from 21% in 2014 to 41% last year.
That means that Keyholes now sees 4 out of every 10 dodgy insurance claims as ‘opportunistic’.
The opportunity suspected of most relevance in this context is the so-called Window of Opportunity (WOP) due to slam shut shortly with the implementation of the Civil Liability Bill.
Yes, yes, you are no doubt tutting, but where does my city stand in the hotspot top ten?
Are you dense or something? There’s a list right underneath this paragraph. Look:
1) Birmingham (a city beginning with B somewhere near the middle of England and Wales)
2) Bradford (a city beginning with B with a high incidence of opportunism)
3) Leeds (a perfectly good city with some top curry houses, sadly over-run with students)
4) Liverpool (them again!)
5) Enfield (never heard of it)
6) Newham (see above)
7) Manchester (so much to answer for)
8) Harrow (an agricultural implement of some kind, we believe)
9) Bolton (WSOTP)
10) Redbridge (see Enfield and Newham above)
If you don’t see you favourite in the list above, simply be on the look out for that call asking whether you realised there was a vast stash of notes on a pallet in a storage facility somewhere, just waiting for you to claim as soon as you’re ready to pretend you really hurt your neck or whatever.
As a wise man once said, you’ve got to be in it to win it!
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