Can a person make a claim against my insurance company for an accident that never happened? No police report!!

Question

My son was driving my vehicle while out on a date with a young lady he'd met. He says that the woman got extremely intoxicated, started acting crazy, and jumped from truck while it was moving down the road at about 15mph. About a year and a half later, the woman is making a claim against my insurance company claiming that my son ran into a fire hydrant and now she has a neck injury. Of course the woman never made a police report because the police would have wanted to see the truck, and therefore would have seen that there wasn't any damage; but her claim is that she didn't make the report because she was scared. This all happened in MN and my question is what can they do? Will my insurance pay this bogus claim? I am a little nervous because she has some attorney who has taken up her case.

Answer 1

Sounds like a very weak case. You should not have anything to worry about.
You need to contact your insurance company, if you haven’t, and let them know what you know. As an Accident Investigator, I see these money-grab cases pretty often. The reason she has made up the fire hydrant story is that if she was drunk and chose to jump from the car it is not considered a traffic accident and therefore would not be able to go after you policy limits.

The amount of time that has passed is probably not beyond the time limitation to file a civil suit, but doesn’t help her case at all; neither does the fact that no police report was filed.

Depending on the size of the car your son was driving, the chances of striking a fire hydrant hard enough to injure the occupants and not knocking it off its pedestal sending water 20 feet in the air and subsequent police notification are pretty slim. Also, this impact would ALMOST certainly been a significant enough change in speed to deploy the vehicles air bags and damaging the vehicle to the extent that it could not be driven and in definite need of repair or being “totaled” by the insurance company. I would expect you have a way to show this was not the case.

Keep all correspondence! If this is what I think it is, this thief and her ambulance-chasing lawyer may change the story to your son having pushed her from the car. Again, not an accident, but they might try to sue you and your son.

Good luck with this.

Answer 2

First of all, in most jurisdictions, a year and a half is too late to claim injury damages, and "I was scared" isn't an excuse unless someone was holding a gun to her head to stop her from calling a lawyer.
Second, she has to prove it, not just claim it. Looks to me, based on the information you provided, that if the truck wasn't damaged (which your insurance company will know about better than anyone else) and there wasn't a police report (aka no record of anything happening at all), she's going to have a really hard time making any kind of case.
Third, if she were to bring this into a court of law, she'd get laughed out of the courtroom, and no attorney in his right mind would take it. Frankly, I'm really surprised she found an attorney to take it to the insurance company -- it's probably a relative of hers or something.
Lastly, I don't think she will get anywhere with this with the insurance company either. Even if she had some proof, insurance companies are very, very good at not paying people, and there's no way they'll entertain her story without any proof and almost two years later. I don't think you have anything to worry about -- but your insurance company will handle it for you, and trust me, they won't pay her without something more than what she's got.

Answer 3

She still has the burden of proof. It will be hard to make the case so long after the event. She would need some documentation of the "accident" such as a record of the truck being repaired. She will also need some kind of medical verification of her "injury".

Answer 4

One thing to prove she is lying is to find out where she says the accident happen then investigate and see if a hydrant in that area ever had to be repaired???

Answer 5

It's an entire year later. It'll be taken as what it is... A phony claim. Unless the idiot can afford some really expensive attorney, I'd not worry about it.

Answer 6

Unless there is proof there's no way this will ever go to anything more then showing that the other person isn't that smart. And actually she might get into trouble.