Insurance Journal: Fake Construction Site Injuries Reaching New Heights in New York City, Suit Says
By: Insurance Journal Staff
Contractors insurance groups say worker injuries are being faked at an unprecedented rate across New York’s construction sites in hopes of receiving workers’ compensation benefits and liability insurance payouts, according to court filings and an ABC News report.
Worker advocates and attorneys said the concerns are overblown and that the court system would catch most fraudsters.
The ABC report quoted Don Orlando, with Tradesman Program Managers, a managing general agent and insurance underwriter, who said he has seen evidence of a widespread conspiracy to orchestrate fake falls and injuries. More and more of those actions have been caught on surveillance cameras, and he recommended that job sites and property owners invest in the cameras.
Some insurers have been taken in by the schemes, with one paying out more than $3 million on a worker – even after doctors determined that the man was not really injured, ABC reported. Court records show that one apartment building in the Bronx was home to 30 plaintiffs claiming construction injuries of the same type and with the same employer, something the director of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud said was suggestive of orchestrated fraud.
Tradesman and two reinsurance companies recently filed lawsuits against dozens of defendants, including claimants, lawyers and doctors who may have participated in the fake-injury schemes.
“Defendants … orchestrated a widespread fraud scheme to defraud Plaintiffs and others by (i) unlawfully grooming and recruiting construction workers into staging and perpetuating fake construction accidents that occurred in New York and/or transforming legitimate minor or localized injuries into lucrative full-body claims; (ii) preparing and collecting documentation as well as submitting, filing, prosecuting and asserting fraudulent workers’ compensation claims and personal injury lawsuits on behalf of such construction workers; (iii) providing or alleging to have provided medically unnecessary and excessive healthcare services to such construction workers; (iv) providing monies directly or indirectly to Defendants and to Claimants to fund the fraud scheme; and/or (v) using the fraudulent diagnoses and medically unnecessary and excessive healthcare services to inflate settlement value,” the complaint reads.
The defendants have yet to file an answer to the suit.