Police and Security, Vol. 34 No. 2, 2025.
Professional paper
https://doi.org/10.59245/ps.34.2.3
Staged Traffic Accidents and Insurance Fraud
Mile Klanac
; Ministry of the Interior, Police Academy - Prvi hrvatski redarstvenik, University of Applied Sciences in Criminal Investigation and Public Security, Zagreb, Republic of Croatia.
Dražen Kralj
; Ministry of the Interior, Police Academy - Prvi hrvatski redarstvenik, University of Applied Sciences in Criminal Investigation and Public Security, Zagreb, Republic of Croatia.
Matej Radočaj
; Ministry of the Interior, Zagreb Police Administration, II Traffic police station, Zagreb, Republic of Croatia.
Abstract
Staging a traffic accident involves portraying its dynamics and the mechanism of its occurrence, with the intention of misleading someone into believing that it actually happened as the participant portrays it. The motive of the staging may be to cover up some other misdemeanour or criminal offence. However, most often, it involves obtaining illegal material benefits through fraud and abuse of automobile liability insurance. Insurance fraud and abuse persist as long as insurance companies themselves exist. The traffic accident investigation aims to find clues at the scene and determine what exactly happened and how. In a large number of staged traffic accidents, the police conduct an investigation, not doubting the truth of what was found at the scene; thus, in a certain way, they give legitimacy to something that did not happen in the way it was shown. The aim of this work is not to research criminal techniques, tactics and methods, nor to research the trends of staged traffic accidents, but the aim is to those who conduct investigations and to all those who deal with this type of delinquency to show in a simple way the technical specificities of some traces that appear in staged traffic accidents accident so that their fit into the temporal and spatial dynamics of the presented occurrence of the traffic accident could be checked through mental reconstruction.
Keywords
driver; vehicle; traffic accident; staging; fraud
Hrčak ID:
331977
URI
Publication date:
18.7.2025.
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