A “perfect hoax” in life insurance

At least two cases of deception and falsehood have been detected in recent months in Sevilla in insurance companies of great importance, some of whose employees have allegedly dedicated themselves to forging the signatures of their clients to rescue life insurance policies and other modalities. One of these matters was resolved with an out-of-court agreement, for which the affected party received 100,000 euros, while the other is still in litigation, after the criminal court 11 acquitted the defendant due to the prescription of the crime, but from whom certain amounts will now be claimed in civil proceedings.

One of the people affected contracted at the time with the company with an insurance company an insurance policy with disability and death coverage, sometimes combined with an installment savings plan. “By this modality, the client pays monthly or annual installments, with the intention that, in the event of incurring in the event of coverage, the agreed amounts are paid. Or, after the passage of a number of years also fixed, that amount is returned with a fixed and safe interest, without any risk”, explains Helena Kabariti Carrionlawyer of MR law firm of Sevillewho has handled both cases.

The terms of validity of such contracts are very long. “The last redemption date can be set even for the twenty years contracted, although the client can rescue them earlier with the penalties also set, corresponding in such a case less amount than if they attended the last date indicated “, adds the lawyer.

“Unfortunately, commercials and mediators of such companies, in an effort to obtain new contract subscriptions from which to charge higher commissions, as well as to dispose of the money deposited by clients by virtue of such rescue policies, have simulated the subscription of new contracts of those clients, taking advantage of the possession of their personal information, both health and identification as banking, with cause in their previous contractual relationship, all of this going through all the filters and prevention protocols within the companies,” says Kabariti.

For the lawyer, who is convinced that there are many more cases, “in an inexplicable way, the companies verify all the operations, authorize transfers of the ransoms and false contracts, signed by the insurer itself, issuing and issuing the receipts of its fees over the years”.

In savings plan contracts, the impersonator falsify the ransom request first, which implies resolving the contract that the client did sign, and redeems the amount deposited up to now, disposes of it and subtracts from it small amounts. In order not to be aware of the operation, he later falsifies the request for a new savings contract and reinvests the amount redeemed in said contract, also falsified, the reinvested amount being lower, both due to the thefts and the penalties for having redeemed before the last term. fixed.

This operation, the lawyer maintains, has been done several times to the same client, generating successive false contracts over time. In them she has always mediated the brokerage intervention or intermediary agencies. All this also implies falsifying bank direct debit orders, health declarations, money receipts and reinvestment orders, among other documents. “In short, a huge amount of false signatures”.

Finally, to fully pass unnoticed, in that false contract, the impersonator fixes the same date expiration date agreed upon in the original truthful contract, with the collection of installments of a similar amount. “In this way, the falsified contract is activated and remains in the legal traffic without being noticed by the client, in the belief that continue to pay the fees for the original contract that he did sign.”

“To make matters worse, the new falsified contracts, for the most part, do not make them in the same modality that the true contract originally had, but they become contracts whose interest varies in attention to swap assets, by one high risk and that imply financial knowledge”. Besides, the wording of these contracts is confusing even for an expert, points out the lawyer, who explains that the victims are usually housewives, health workers or professionals without any study or knowledge in economic and financial matters. “This change is due to the fact that the commissions to be received by the mediators for obtaining the subscription of such contracts are better remunerated by the companies than if the reinvestment were made in another contract like the first, with fixed interest and without risk.”

This is a “perfect” hoax. “We are talking about policies in which the client’s idea is to rescue them twenty years later. When he, or his relatives if he has died, realize, if they give it to him, many years have passed. There is no trace of the distracted money nor of the material authors of the false signatures, whose data does not appear in the forged documents, since people who are not even registered in the company are in charge of doing it and put the data of the mediating agency, with which they collaborate unofficially. Fortunately, the personal identification of some of the counterfeiters has been clarified in the arduous investigation carried out from my office and later accredited in court, all their data being in my possession,” he argues. To install Helena Kabariti.

Everything is discovered when the beneficiary incurs the coverage, such as a disabling illness, and requests payment or, in other cases, when you decide to redeem the agreed amount, always presenting his contract. From the entity they respond that said contract no longer in force.

“Even taking advantage of the last falsified contract, in case of requesting disability coverage, the entity bases the refusal to pay on what His health data, which was also falsified, is not trueso it is given to understand that the client lied in his health statement and, therefore, they do not have to pay the coverage according to the same contract”, assures the lawyer.

In the case of wanting to rescue, they impose the payment of an amount considerably lower than what would correspond to him by his original contract, “given the rescues that were carried out with the penaltiesthe amounts stolen and the totally confusing wording of the last falsified contract, even though the amount to be paid by the company is less than the total amount drawn and collected from the client throughout all the years”.

Kabariti assures that this “there is more going on than people could imagine“. “Insured in life, disability and savings plan policies, which they have been paying for many years strictly, and that when they meet the requirements to receive the contracted coverage or claim their redemptions, which usually amount to very high sums, they claim their right and the entity denies it based on falsified documents, where mediators and brokers and simple commercials intervene, who over time they can become untraceable”.

For the lawyer, the “most disconcerting thing is that the companies, repeatedly informed by the client that all their documentation has been falsified, even having convincingly confirmed legal expert reports proving it, They continue to give overtones of legality to everything and cover up the factseither not providing documents or providing altered or irrelevant documents to the judicial investigation with a clear intention to confuse, imposing the last false contract on the client, not even agreeing to suspend the payment of the installments and maintaining their collection, all of this, despite having manifestly completely breached all its duties of surveillance, organization and control over the employees or collaborators acting on its behalf, incurring in multiple punishable violations of consumer rights and the protection of their data”.

The lawyer who has discovered this matter maintains that “without a doubt the personal data protection law has been constantly infringed by such companies and the guarantee of digital rights, making non-consensual use of customer data, as well as failing to comply with their duties of informing the policyholder in this type of insurance with life and death coverage and high risk, without carrying out or demanding no questionnaire of health on occasions not even any solvency study and of course the application of any regulations for the prevention of crimes in their activity has been absent, they have not even had their forms or contractual application forms protected or controlled, nor have they checked the actuarial calculations on this type of products, since the premium paid for false contracts differed from that corresponding to the true contract”.

Many of these counterfeits affect old peoplewith delicate states of health, which are not in conditions optimal nor with enough energy to face “the economic, psychological and time wear that this entails, counting on the possible negligence of the client in the face of such serious injustice and patrimonial damage caused”.

“In my legal assistance, it is a striking case in which the victim, a doctor by profession, had contracted life and permanent disability insurance with the insurance company belonging to the College of Physicians of Seville, where the mediating brokerage, despite the insurer having suffered mergers after the first contract, was always the same”, says the lawyer.

Many years after the contract, the client was declared the permanent absolute disability for him National Institute of Social Security. This man informed his brokerage, to which he sent the resolution and requested payment of the coverage. However, it “dedicated itself to requesting an infinity of completely irrelevant medical documentation, since it had already been evaluated by the own medical court of Social Security”. Finally, eight months later, “after multiple calls and emails and an alarming negligence on the part of the company, they notified him of the rejection of the claim based on the existence of a series of undeclared medical antecedents at the time of contracting the The policy”.

By asking the company for its file and the aforementioned health declaration, there had indeed been new bogus contracts and the health declaration attached to one of them had never been completed or signed by the client, whose data did not match the real ones. They did not coincide from the weight to the supposed absence of diseases or surgical interventions prior to the declaration.

After more than a year of claims and extrajudicial attempts, the lawyer had to resort “in a forced manner to a complaint before the courts of Seville so that they would agree to the payment of 100,000 euros that corresponded to her.”

The other case was prosecuted by the Criminal Court 11 of Sevillewho confirmed that the continued forgeries of the client’s signature took place on various occasions, signing on her behalf up to two consecutive high-risk contractswith their ransom requests in turn, although given the passage of a significant amount of time from the forgeries to the filing of their lawsuit, the crimes were declared prescribed and therefore its damage will have to be prosecuted in civil proceedings. In these questions, the passage of time and the way in which this research is carried out are decisive.

Insurer sources indicated that the defendant had worked for the company years ago and knew all the protocols and systems thereof, so could violate the filters and controls against this type of practice. The events occurred when the man no longer had a working relationship with the company. Likewise, the insurer regretted what happened and, as soon as she learned of it, she stopped working with the brokerage involved.