Dishonesty Increases Personal Insurance Rates

It is almost tragic when homeowners realize that dishonesty had a direct part in the recent increase of the personal insurance rates on their homeowner's policy. This homeowner followed the rules for obtaining full insurance coverage on their home as was expected by their mortgage company. What was not expected was that there were thousands of individuals who insured their homes that year just to make a profit.

Due to damages to homes sustained by hurricanes many years before, insurance companies were forced to raise rates to cover an extreme number of claims for personal property damage. Some of these damages were included on personal property insurance policies but were achieved through other methods that were dishonest and ended up cheating other honest homeowners out of repairing their homes completely.

Some of the dishonesty caused insurance to abandon personal insurance coverage to certain States within the United States. This was not because personal insurance coverage was not needed but because the insurance companies felt defeated. They transacted business in good faith to many customers and found discrepancies were plentiful when people filed claims that were clearly unfounded.

Insurance rates were paid by the honest people in these States but the claims process never stopped. Dishonest people filed claims for boats they never owned and for homes they never bought. People that live in areas that are hardest hit by hurricanes throughout the year can get dishonest very fast if they are looking to make a quick buck that knowingly to them would take food out of the mouths of children and cause them to have no schools to return to the following year.

Some of these dishonest people formed into groups long before the storm hit. They dug through public records and found leases that had expired on property and bought this property for a pittance of the price that they stated on the insurance claim they filed. These actions caused the people to receive a payment that they did not deserve and made the personal insurance rates of many rise overnight.

Some people were dishonest enough to file personal insurance claims for the deaths of children that they never gave birth to. Some dishonest people got caught because they did not realize that social security numbers are assigned to children just like everybody else. This one factor probably saved insurance companies millions of dollars that could be given to someone else.

Legalities left personal insurance company agents with a tracking device that eventually tracked down these discrepancies and brought the dishonest people into court with several lawsuits against them for insurance fraud. This still did not reduce the rates for the personal insurance policies of thousands but it did serve to slow dishonest people down quite a bit.