What punishment can I get for insurance fraud?

Different types of penalties for committing insurance fraud

There are many consequences to committing insurance fraud. However, this depends on the form, severity and extent of the fraud. Insurance fraud that is committed on a large scale is punished more severely than lying about information on an application. Insurance fraud can have the following consequences:

No claims payment

The insurance company will not pay out any more money to you if it is established that you have committed fraud. It is usually the case that insurers choose not to pay out your submitted claim even if you have only committed a small amount of fraud, for example by declaring a mobile phone in the claim after a burglary, while the phone was not actually stolen. When the insurer notices that you are committing fraud and can establish this, they can refuse to pay out the claim, which also means that the actual stolen items will not be reimbursed. In the end, you are left with higher costs than if you had just been honest.

A fine of €532

Anyone found to be committing insurance fraud has been subject to a standard fine of €532 since 2016. The Service Organisation Direct Liability (SODA) collects this fine. This fine was created by the Dutch Association of Insurers in order to be able to tackle and punish fraudsters even more harshly and also hope to deter potential fraudsters and thus prevent fraud.

Paying for research costs

An insurer must be able to prove a suspicion of fraud. That is why an insurer almost always initiates an investigation when fraud is suspected. Sometimes the insurer can choose to have an expert or an investigation bureau conduct the investigation. This can lead to very high costs. As soon as it has been established that fraud has been committed, the costs of the investigation will be recovered from the fraudster. This is a good thing, because if you had not committed fraud, the insurer would not have had to set up an investigation.

A registration as a fraudster

While it may not seem like an immediate hefty penalty, a registration due to insurance fraud also has quite an impact when you would like to purchase new insurance in the future.
First, you will be stored by the insurer in the fraud register that each insurer maintains internally, with the goal of keeping the insurance company in question alert and preventing any further insurance from being purchased by you from the company. This fraud register is only accessible and viewable within the insurance company in question.

Then you also get a CIS registration. Whereas the internal fraud registers are only for the insurer itself, the database of Stichting CIS is accessible for every affiliated insurer. Stichting Centraal Informatie Systeem, or CIS Foundation, stores all data that is important for insurers, with the aim of limiting the risks of insurers when they apply and preventing fraud. Not only fraudsters are registered, but also defaulters and people with a driving disqualification or criminal record.

Heaviest penalty: report

Finally, one can also opt for the most severe punishment for insurance fraud: reporting the offence to the police. In practice, a denunciation is only made in the case of very high amounts of fraud or when it concerns an organised crime. It is therefore mainly the more serious cases that are involved.

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