Laurence Dollimore
MALAGA is the Spanish province with the highest rate of insurance fraud attempts.
According to Unespa, a business association that groups insurance companies in Spain, Malaga has 1,379 cases of known fraud attempts per 100,000 inhabitants.
It is far more than second-placed Alicante which has 927, followed by A Coruña’s 855 and Murcia’s 853.
Last year, Malaga recorded around 22,500 attempts at insurance fraud, most of them related to personal, health or accident insurance, which totaled about 14,000.
These were followed by car insurance, with 5,700, and finally the other various insurances (home, trade and civil liability), which were about 2,800.
According to the head of Prevention and Fraud Prevention of Unespa, Miguel Ángel Vázquez, Malaga is the only province above the thousand attempts mark of fraud per 100,000 inhabitants.
According to Vázquez, the bad economic situation following the crash led to an increase in the occasional fraud as people found themselves in desperate situations.
Fraud attempts related to the home and small robberies were the most common.
The head of Unespa does not believe that there is a geographical pattern in terms of the most fraudulent territories in Spain.
“It is quite difficult to define the reasons why a province has more attempts, whether it has to do with the profile of the insured, their economic activity that or the presence of certain sectors … I do not think that within Spain there is one society more defrauding than another,” he said.
This should come as no surprise! Generally in Spain, the further south you go, the worse this kind of thing becomes. Nice to know that these vermin are helping drive up my insurance premiums though.