Tehran, Iran, October 14
By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:
Some Iranians have been making use of their coverage to receive money that they did not deserve.
There have been reports that some insurance holders in Iran intentionally inflict damages upon their properties in order to receive money from their insurer.
As acknowledged by many people in Iran, a simple way they do so is to vandalize their car and then fake an accident scene.
A more sophisticated method, which has found way to local news outlets, has been to anaesthetize a person, break his front teeth (which claim a high fee from insurers), and leave them at a fake accident scene by the highway, and then report the scene to emergency. This has been done by gangs that work professionally and usually pay about 20 percent of the claimed fee to the fake victim of the accident and keep the rest.
That was for gangs, but there has also been a report that the staff of an insurance company branch in a southern province of Iran did fake an accident scene and managed to take a good sum of money from the main headquarters in Tehran.
The Iranian law says that people who fake an accident scene are liable to 2 to 6 months’ prison term, according to police officials.
But recently a more heinous storyof misusing insurance coverage used in local news outlets, where a father had actually murdered his family to receive their life insurance claims.
The 31-year-old man had shot dead his wife and 11-month-old child with the hope to cash their life insurance, a court found out last week.
According to CEO of Iran Central Insurance Abdolnasser Hemmati, insurance penetration in Iran hovers around 2 percent and the government plans to improve the number to 3.2 by 2025.
According to the official, the most outstanding challenge of the insurance business in Iran is that the malfunctioning of insurance companies.