Who says insurance agents don’t have a sense of humor? They’d have to, to sit back and read some of the insurance claims that drivers and homeowners file today without becoming raving lunatics! Here is a collection of the funniest, most ludicrous and most outrageous insurance claims to ever pass across the desk of an insurance claims director, as told by comedian Jasper Carrott, website www.businessballs.com and the Charlotte evening news.
1)A Charlotte lawyer purchased a box of costly cigars and insured them against flood, storm damage and, of all things, fire. Needless to say, his investment went up in (happily inhaled) smoke within a month, after which the lawyer filed a claim with his homeowners insurance company that he was owed compensation because “the cigars were lost in a series of small fires”. The insurer refused to pay, assuming (correctly) that the man had smoked the pack himself. A judge ruled, however, that since the insurer had never stated what was considered to be “unacceptable” fire the company did, in fact, owe him $15,000 to replace his property.
The insurance company paid the claim, but they got their own back in the end. The lawyer was then arrested, sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine for 24 counts of arson and insurance fraud.
2)True story: When asked to describe how he had come to have a one on one with a lamppost the driver stated that he had not been able to see the post because “it was obscured by human beings.”
3)Only in Louisiana could you get away with filing an insurance claim stating, “Windshield broke. Cause unknown. Probably voodoo.”
4)It’s all H2O to me. A judge had to educate a homeowners insurance provider on the fundamentals of chemistry when a washing machine got stuck on boil and steam cleaned an entire kitchen beyond repair. The insurance company tried to claim that steam damage shouldn’t be covered under the homeowners water damage policy.
5)A woman meeting her husband, a Navy crewman who was due into port that day, parked at the end of the slip where the submarine was due in to berth. There was an inexperienced ensign at the helm who overshot his landing and hit the end of the slip, breaking a section away and sending the car plunging into the water. Needless to say, those damages were on Uncle Sam!
6)There may not have been a tornado in town, but a driver unfortunate enough to have picked that day to park his car by the side of the road was treated to a moment in Oz when a house came crashing down off the flatbed of the truck hired to move it, completely destroying his vehicle.
7)Will these pedestrians never learn? A driver stated on his insurance claim form that “I knocked over a man. He admitted it was his fault, as he’d been knocked over before!” Another driver quite practically pointed out, “The pedestrian had no idea which direction to run, so I ran over him.”
8)In a nod to punctuality, a driver was rushing out of his drive on his way to work at seven o’clock in the morning and ran straight into a bus-who was five minutes early.