Man sentenced for £60,000 ‘crash for cash’ claim involving fake collision in California

A man has been sentenced for making an insurance claim worth £59,987, after he pretended he crashed a hire car whilst on holiday.

Jack Higgins, 38, of Brook Street, Bradford, claimed that he rented a Range Rover whilst on holiday in California. He alleged that, as he was driving the Range Rover, he swerved to avoid an animal on the road and crashed the vehicle into a wall.

Higgins’ insurer received a tip-off that the claim was fake and referred the case to the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) for investigation.

Higgins pleaded guilty at Leeds Crown Court on 4 March 2025 to fraud by false representation. He was sentenced at the same court on 4 April 2025 to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years.

He has paid back the £59,987 received from the insurance company. During the sentencing, Higgins was also ordered to pay £6,000 to IFED to cover the cost of a voice analysis carried out as part of the investigation, and to complete 300 hours of unpaid work.

Detective Constable Stuart Osborne, from the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED), said:

“Higgins thought he could take his insurer for a ride and defraud it out of a significant sum of money. Fraudulent claims like this push up the cost of insurance premiums for honest policyholders.

“The major pitfall for Higgins was the indisputable evidence against him. We conducted an extensive investigation to show that, not only had he been in the UK when the collision allegedly occurred, he forged the documents he sent to his insurer.

“Higgins has now been left with a criminal record and must pay an additional £6,000 worth of costs. IFED and the insurance industry will work together to make sure that submitting bogus claims for road traffic collisions doesn’t pay, wherever in the world the collision is said to have taken place.”

In January 2019, Higgins took out an insurance policy, which provided worldwide cover when driving hire cars.

Higgins raised a claim against the policy the following month. He claimed that he hired a Range Rover from a car hire company called All Star Car Rental while on holiday in California. As he was driving the Range Rover on Interstate 110, he swerved to avoid an animal on the road and crashed the vehicle into a wall.

Higgins told his insurer that he paid All Star Car Rental £59,987 to cover the cost of repairs to the Range Rover. He provided the insurance company with supporting evidence including documentation from All Star Car Rental and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), a completed SR-1 form used to report road traffic collisions in California, photos of the damaged Range Rover and bank statements.

The insurance company received ten phone calls from Higgins to chase the payment. The claim was settled in March and Higgins received a total of £59,987.

In August, the insurance company received a phone call from an acquaintance of Higgins, who reported that Higgins had been in the UK when the collision allegedly took place.

An investigation by the insurance company found that there was no record of Higgins having entered the US around the time the collision occurred and that All Star Car Rental did not exist. It referred the case to IFED for further investigation.

Officers from IFED found that the photos of the damaged Range Rover had been taken from a vehicle auction website.

In addition, documentation from the LAPD, which Higgins submitted to his insurer as part of the evidence to support his claim, was found to have been forged. The Californian Highway Patrol (CHP) confirmed to IFED officers that it would have been the point of contact for any 911 calls to investigate the collision, rather than the LAPD, due to Interstate 110 being under its jurisdiction.

IFED officers worked with the CHP to review Higgins’ SR-1 form. An officer from the CHP confirmed that the SR-1 form would not have been used to report road traffic collisions that occurred on a state freeway. A check of the Californian Department of Motor Vehicles’ databases confirmed that the SR-1 form had never been filed.

Further enquiries made with Higgins’ bank confirmed that the bank statements he provided the insurance company had been forged.

Higgins was arrested by IFED officers in July 2020. During his police interview, he stated that he did not know anything about the insurance claim. He said that he had been set up by the person who contacted the insurance company in August 2019 to report that the claim was fraudulent.

Following the interview, officers commissioned a voice analysis to compare Higgins’ voice against recordings of the ten phone calls made to the insurance company before the claim was paid out. The analysis concluded that there was strong evidence to show that Higgins made the calls.

During a second interview with IFED officers in 2022, Higgins stated that the phone calls could have been made using deepfake technology. When officers told Higgins that the level of deepfake technology needed to make a real-time phone call did not exist in 2019, he stated that the person who set him up could have invented it or taken it from the dark web.

A second voice analysis was commissioned and found no evidence to support Higgins’ allegations around deepfake technology.

A review of a laptop seized from Higgins showed that it had been used to produce the documents submitted to the insurance company.