Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category

Insurance companies pledge to pay out for UK riot damage

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Damage caused by civil unrest should not impact on people making insurance claims, a Zurich spokesman says, but customers should check their policies

Insurers have said they will pay out to customers who have had possessions damaged and stolen in the riots in London and across the rest of the country.

Some policyholders had been concerned that they wouldn’t qualify for a payout because the losses were a result of civil unrest, but insurers said this wasn’t a problem.

Keith Lewis, a spokesman for insurer Zurich, said: “As a customer it doesn’t matter what is happening – the issue of whether it is classed as rioting or civil unrest rises when we as insurers are trying to reclaim costs. It is a back-office issue.”

Lewis said Zurich had sent a team of loss adjusters to Tottenham early yesterday morning, and had more specialists ready to visit the scenes of other clashes.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI), which is currently putting the cost to the industry at “tens of millions of pounds”, urged those affected to call their insurers as soon as possible.

The ABI’s director of general insurance, Nick Starling, said: “We have every sympathy for residents and business owners who have suffered damage to their properties.

“This is a time of enormous stress for them and their insurers will be on hand to answer any questions that they may have.”

Home and business policies

The ABI said standard home insurance policies should cover fire, looting or damage caused, and that many policies would also cover accommodation costs for those unable to stay in their homes.

Most commercial insurance policies would cover businesses for damage to their premises, it said, including interruption to their business.

Some policies also cover businesses which were not damaged, but whose trade is affected by the aftermath. Owners of businesses which were not damaged but are losing income due to denial of access should check their policies.

The ABI said business owners should act quickly, as many insurance policies required claims to be made within a set time period – often just seven days.

Motor and travel policies

Owners of cars damaged in the unrest will be able to claim if they have fully comprehensive cover, but may not qualify for a payout if they have anything less.

Graeme Trudgill of the British Insurance Brokers’ Association said for those with third party, fire and theft cover, the situation would depend on what had happened to their vehicle.

“If someone whacks it with a pole then it is not covered; if they set fire to it, it is,” he said.

One area where things are less cut and dried is travel insurance. A spokeswoman for the ABI said police officers who have to cancel a holiday because they have had their leave rescinded will be covered, but other people may not.

“If someone’s business has been affected, and there is a reason they cannot travel, then they would need to contact their insurer and it would be considered on a case-by-case basis – but even that would not be covered by a standard policy in my view,” she said.

Politicians who have had to cut short their holidays to return to London may also find they are not covered.

Uninsured home and business owners

Under the 1886 Riot (Damages) Act the police are obliged to compensate people who have had their property and/or buildings damaged or stolen during disturbances like those seen this week.

Home and business owners who do not have insurance or are underinsured should make a claim to their local police force.

To make things difficult, claims need to be made in writing and within 14 days of the event taking place. The ABI is calling for this to be extended to 42 days to give people chance to asses how much they have lost.

Anyone affected by the riots could also apply for a crisis loan to help them meet daily expenses while claims are settled. These are loans from the government designed to help people in emergencies.

Hilary Osborne


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Posted in Business, Car insurance, Crime, guardian.co.uk, Home insurance, House News, Insurance, Insurance industry, London, Money, Motoring, News, Property, Small business, Travel insurance, UK news, UK riots | Comments Closed

Property title fraud costs Land Registry £26m in compensation

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Criminals are taking out mortgages on property they do not own, leaving the real owners thousands of pounds in debt

The Land Registry, the government department that logs land and property ownership in England and Wales, has paid out more than £26m since 2006 compensating victims of a recurring property fraud.

The con – called property title theft – involves criminals taking out mortgages on properties they do not own, pocketing the money and leaving the real owner thousands of pounds in debt.

Last year, the Registry paid out compensation for frauds of £4.51m, the second-highest loss on record, as well as costs of a further £440,000, according to the department’s annual report. There were 53 cases of the fraud compensated in 2009/10, down from 62 incidents in 2008/09 when the loss totalled £4.23m with costs of £815,000.

Patrick McCloy, director of title theft experts Gatekeeper Protection, said: “Payouts may rise exponentially as victims often do not know they have been victims of fraud until they come to sell their property, which may be many years later. As such, it is likely that victims are ‘building up’ and gradually more and more are becoming aware of the problem and discovering they are victims.”

The compensation figures, which relate to all frauds but much of which are believed to relate to title theft, have been growing steadily each year, with the exception of the £8.63m loss the Registry sustained in 2005/06. Almost all of that was paid to the Candy Brothers and their bankers HBOS after the luxury property developers were swindled by four pensioners who sold them a 47-acre Berkshire estate that they did not own.

That claim dated back to 2004 when Nick and Christian Candy paid £6.5m to a quartet of fraudsters in their sixties and early seventies, believing they were purchasing King’s Beeches in Sunninghill, an estate that actually belonged to a billionaire Saudi sheikh, Khalid bin Mahfouz. Forged paperwork lodged with the Registry suggested that the pensioners were the real owners.

A spokesman for the Registry said: “Fraud has grown generally in the financial sector in recent years and there has been a growth in identity theft – almost two million people are affected by ID fraud every year.

“But we believe the majority of property frauds are perpetrated before registration: for example by impersonating the registered proprietor and obtaining a mortgage, a transaction which Land Registry would have no involvement with until after the money had been forwarded by the lender and the fraud had been successfully completed.”

Before 2003, the Registry used watermarked land certificates to prove a person owned a property, but they were abolished as the records went paperless and were then made available online to the public in 2006.

Now, all that is needed to sell or remortgage a property is an identity and an address: so if the registered owner is one John Smith, then any John Smith can deal with the property. Experts say it is easy for a potential imposter to adopt a new name, while buy-to-let properties without a mortgage are thought to be most at risk, as tenants can intercept post that might alert the owner to a fake mortgage application.

The Registry said: “We do not believe that abolishing certificates caused more fraud.”

However, according to internal Registry emails, released under the Freedom of Information Act, the department has been avoiding publicly addressing the issue of land certificates. The confidential emails state that questions on the subject could lead to “unwanted questions of whether [their abolition] has contributed to registration fraud itself, which we have evidence to say it may have done”.

Simon Goodley


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