Have I got a story to tell you! Are you sitting down? Well sit down and take a load off. This is going to blow your mind!! This sounds like something that could happen in a foreign country, not here in the good ole USA! A 36 yr old woman, named Tracy Martin was at a car dealership buying a used truck. She meets this insurance broker who claims he can get her a good deal on an insurance policy with Progressive Insurance. Tracy is a hardworking woman whose husband is disabled and she could use a good deal because money is tight. So she agrees to the deal. That was 2013, well now fast forward 2 yrs to present day. One night when Tracy is out with friends, she gets a frantic call from her husband telling her that her truck has been impounded from the police and they left her a notice. Tracy is shocked and scared, what kind of fresh hell is this? Her truck payments are current and so is her insurance, or so she thought. Turns out the police did indeed impound her truck because of fraudulent insurance. That good deal policy with Progressive was a fake policy. This is a new scam that scammers have come up with and it is sweeping the midwest and Florida. What the scammers do is get a real policy with say Progressive or Freeway Insurance and they only pay the initial down payment so that they can get the insurance card and a policy number. They use fake information to arrange payments with the insurance company and so when it goes to get the 2nd payment it is declined and then the policy is cancelled for nonpayment. But the damage has been done because the scammer has sold that policy to some unsuspecting hard working individual who was just looking for a deal. And by the time the victim finds out that their policy has been cancelled, it is too late and they have made several payments to the "insurance broker", and he has now absconded with those proceeds. That's exactly what happened to Tracy, her "insurance broker" Jonathan Brown never worked for the company that he told her that he worked for. And Progressive never heard of him either. By the time the police impounded her vehicle, Tracy had paid an additional $2,000.00 in premiums to Jonathan Brown.
And to add insult to injury and here is the really fucked up part. The Detroit police impounded Tracy's truck because they say she knew that the insurance was fake therefore they were doing an asset forfeiture on her truck because she broke the law. And the only way for her to get her truck back is if she buys it at auction. WTF!!! How can this happen? Well, in Michigan, the police can do an asset forfeiture without going to court if the asset is worth $50,000.00 or less. They simply need to fill out some forms to do it. And since they cannot get the scammers, they will go after the consumer instead because the police say most know it's a scam and have broken the law. Sometimes the police will let you pay a fine and get your vehicle back, one woman this happened to was lucky enough to be able to do just that. She paid the police $345 fine for them to release the vehicle, and then she paid the tow service $445 for the tow. She was lucky. Most end up like Tracy and have to try and buy their vehicles back at police auctions. Tracy says the police wont tell her when or where the auction is to be held. So she is worried they may sell her truck to someone else and then she will be out of her truck for good.
So here is something my father taught me about deals, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is". So if you meet some insurance broker who tells you he can get you a good deal on insurance, for like $100.00 a month when you know you should be paying $200.00 a month, something is wrong here folks!!! Insurance companies are out to make as much money as they can and they are not going to give you a cut rate deal just for nothing. Be for real here! And Michigan has a law where drivers need to have unlimited lifetime medical for injured parties, that's why insurance is so HIGH in Michigan.So Tracy should have known by the price that something was amiss. But some people are just naive and think that there are people out there willing to help them for nothing. ( Rolls Eyes!) I could never be that naive!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment