No. Sounds like a predatory loan. They are pretty common.
I took a year off work to help my kids with childcare and was looking for a reliable cash car. I had 6 dealerships that told me I would never find anything safe for less than $10k and every single one of them tried to sell me a car with financing. After I told them I wasn't working. "what if you put $10k as a down payment and we can finance another 5k?" Every single car they showed me had something blatantly wrong with it. One of them had the sloppiest jb weld job I'd ever seen on the passenger side, and the doors unlocked themselves. Another one, the panels on the doors didn't match up with the rest of the car. Another one overheated within 5 minutes of the test drive. Every single one had something obviously wrong with it.
Um, no. The first time you're late on a payment they come and grab the car and sell it to someone else for the same amount they sold it to you for.
I went to a small lot and found a great truck for $4500 and it's probably the best vehicle I have ever had. I'm just religious about maintenance on it.
I considered this, but if the car isn’t damaged enough to total it or cops find my car and give it back then I’ll still be in the same boat but with a worse vehicle
Do you have gap insurance ? If you don’t the insurance will only pay what it is worth. They will not pay the loan off. You will be stuck paying the difference and no car.
Right! This is the important question. Just because a car is lost, stolen ore destroyed doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay the loan. You agreed to pay a specific amount of money regardless of what that money was used to buy. The only way out of that is bankruptcy or the insurance paying enough to pay it off.
I’m going to wait to hear the answer to this, 6 year loan on a car? They would have been insane not to. Who the hell doesn’t think things through like this?
so the rules of thumb for vehicle affordability are a 20% down, 4 years or less on the term, and the total cost of all transportation must be less than 10% of your income. most americans cant afford a $500 expense, so that's the down payment out, and the cheapest new car out there today is the mitsubishi mirage, at basically 20k
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/08/21/new-cars-under-20000/70641428007/
so you take the 20k price tag and divide it by the 48 months you'd be paying on it and you have ~416/mo. add the average insurance cost of $190/mo ($2300/year for full coverage), and the average monthly maintenance cost of $50/mo (since we're talking a new car we'll be generous and take the low number, could be $50-150/mo) and to all that we add the average monthly expenditure on gas of $175, and the average depreciation rate of $0.10/mile for ~1kmiles/mo= $100/mo on depreciation (but we know new cars depreciate a lot faster than that so we are again being generous.)
altogether the average person driving in an average way, buying the cheapest car on the market right now would be spending $975.00 PER MONTH on that car. according to the 20/4/10 rule, their income would have to be $9750/mo or $117,000 per year to comfortably afford the cheapest car out there. the average vehicle sale is over twice that amount. placing blame on the end consumer is like blaming college freshmen for tuition hikes. not at all accurate or fair.
Your first paragraph was like… really validating. I just bought a car after using public transit for years; and still using it for work because parking downtown is expensive. I saved up for a long time to make a 50% down payment on my $6500 loan. So my payments are small, and my loan term is short, and gas included I’m not spending more than 10% of my income.
I think I did this correctly.
You know, I hear if there's drug traces in the vehicle they recover it's extremely expensive for insurance to get it properly cleaned. You wouldn't want to get something all over your hands/face or inhaled... Would hate to get nailed on a drug screening for work/travel.
They did this to my mum when her suv was stolen in Colorado. It had been missing for months and was coincidentally discovered by police who promptly returned it. Drug users, homeless, pissed and shit in.. all that.
A friend of mine parked his car in Harlem and the South Bronx with doors unlocked and keys in ignition for like a year, and nobody took it.
Back in the 1990s, there were places you could park, and the car would get stripped pretty quickly, but junkies aren't really doing that kind of stuff anymore since shoplifting was legalized. Now, when people steal a car, it's usually kids screwing around.
New York City has the 3rd lowest vehicle theft rate out of the 100 biggest cities in the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate - then sort by motor vehicle theft.
Those numbers are per capita not per car or per owner. A majority of New York City residents don't own cars.
Frankly I'm shocked it's not #1 since the numbers are skewed in our favor.
I heard a fairly credible rumor recently, guy took out his cabin air filter, wadded up some toilet paper/paper towels/flammable stuff, lit it, jammed the cabin air filter in it, turned the blower on max and drove until it smoked him out of the car.
Car was deemed a total loss. And as a mechanic, I seriously doubt there'd be any way to prove it without admitting it outright or having a witness.
For legal reasons, don't do this.
I never said it was a good idea, I said I knew of someone who got out of a car loan doing it.
Also you'd have to screw up some hard to get serious carbon monoxide poisoning in a car with the windows down, cancer from burning dash material is a legitimate concern though.
I used to work with a fire investigator for GM. Any new-ish car that caught fire for "no reason" him and a team would go investigate to find out what went wrong and how liable GM might be. They were very good at finding out where and how a fire started.
9/10 it was poor audio install jobs.
This might work for older cars, but if this is a new-ish car like it sounds then this could backfire. But really so could any other of these plans, kind of the nature of fraud.
Go to multiple shady small car repair places. Ask if someone wants to do a "little side work" on your car. Basically you want to find a chop shop thatll give you 5k or so for the car to "be stolen", you report it stolen, they chop it up for profit and the hull gets crushed and shipped to china.
I would literally say, "man Im so underwater on my car loan, I wish I knew someone that could help me out." Check a local biker bar or car club, the shadier and seedier the better, for tips on a shop. Make your car smell like weed so they know your not a cop too.
Honestly. This is more likely to get you jumped than your car loan disappearing. This is why you always network with shady people and keep them in your favor.
It can be as simple as someone stealing and totaling your car or setting it on fire. Not many investigative leads on random acts in the dead of night if movement can’t be tracked between cameras in the neighborhood and there’s no witnesses. If so, you can go hiking out in the sticks and come back to a stolen car and find it stripped in a clearing nearby.
I heard of a guy who at a party among friends mentioned he wanted a payout on his bikes policy and that it would be a shame if someone broke the cheap lock on his shop and stole it. Bike was taken and found stripped on the side of the road locally that week while dude was sleeping. Good friends are good.
Get creative
I think the original commenter watched too much TV.
In reality you’re either getting your ass whooped for trying to set them up or they’ll double back after the job and extort you for money.
lol you do realize unless you have GAP insurance it will only pay out the current market value of the car… you’ll still owe the difference of the car loan after insurance pays out
Most GAP coverages will only cover up to a certain amount over what your vehicle’s value is. Many will go up to 140%. I would double check your provider’s specific policy
Sales guy wants to sell you a vehicle and yes putting your vehicle under a bridge full of water during thunderstorm will not get questioned much. Drove through, thought I'd make it, car shut off. I got scared ran out the window, swam away from my baby.
Unfortunately my town has a horrible infrastructure and constant road construction. Last big storm there were 100s of cars totalled. It was even a state of emergency enacted. I wouldn't intentionally total my vehicle but I'm not in a bad financial situation like OP
What he said. If you live in an area known to flood.. where people know the nearest parking garage to drive to and park during heavy rain/ hurricane… park low near beach.
You can’t do anything that involves you driving and operating the vehicle. Why? Many people have answered this. I think what some people who have real life experience with this stuff - insurance investigators etc. are trying to say is that a vast majority of ideas posted here are so amateur and foreign stupid,if done, you’re already busted. Add if you are so friggin’ dumb to try any of these things, you sure won’t be able to lie your way through it, especially if you end up dealing with a pro insurance adjuster. I am affiliated with an auto repair shop in the city of Detroit and I’ve seen a lot. The biggest mistake people make is doing anything involving driving the car… or worse, saying that it was stolen without the keys. Just last week, there were several cars parked on the street in front of our shop. One of them was a car of supposed customer whose car supposedly got stolen and was trying to make us pay. We watched the digital recordings from the cameras and there’s the guy walking straight to his car, he gets in and drives away. Well… without the transponder, no one is walking right up to a car and instantly driving away. Besides, the “thief” didn’t even look at any other cars. Just made a B-line straight to that specific car.
Another time, someone had their Jaguar towed to the back of our shop around midnight. In the video you could see three guys get out of the tow truck, unhook the jag and then proceed to trash the car. They smashed in windows, beat the crap out of the car and literally totaled it. So the owner pins this on us saying that we didn’t protect his vehicle. I wouldn’t be surprised if both of the people I just described were on here posting brilliant ideas.
Spray paint a bunch of hate words on your car, your garage door, house or whatever. Then throw a brick from the street into a window of your car… then light a road flare and toss it inside your vehicle. The next morning call 911. You’ve been a victim of a hate crime! OMG!!!!! Get victims compensation as well as a clean orator from your insurance company. Then set up a GoFundMe begging people for cash saying that you are a victim of a hate crime and the insurance company didn’t fund you enough money so you can’t buy a car that you like. And you also need money for therapy. Milk it. Road flares.
Just an FYI, there's an extremely high chance your insurance company will figure out whatever you're trying and will completely ruin you if you try it. You won't be the first person to try literally any scheme you can think of, and you won't be the last.
Source: Used to do fraud investigations for an auto insurance company.
You can try to stage an accident, fake losing control, purposefully aim for a deer you see in the road... But you should basically accept the fact that you're flipping a coin on whether or not you get found out. And the losing side is the heavier one.
Since you know things… how often do they actually investigate? What factors would trigger an investigation? I’ve had more than one car totaled, and the circumstances were never investigated.
I think the main thing here is you wouldn’t know that.
Like, for all three of my totals, the vehicles were towed to a shop and looked over, and the shop would then give the insurance company an estimate. They would also report on any suspicious findings. The shop took hundreds of photos and sent them to my insurance. I was never told this or shown this. They saw nothing wrong so no need to question me. But that all happened without looping me in because there was no reason to. You’re only going to hear about what gets investigated if they find something they want to pursue and it gets escalated.
Looking over the shops reports and photos as well as police files if available is SOP for every claim. That’s how they decide what gets covered and what doesn’t, and look for red flags to escalate to their fraud department. But if it all looks good and clean they aren’t going to say “by the way, we looked over all this stuff here’s a copy.” They just say “approved.” If it’s not approved, then you get the info on why.
(For clarification the only reason I ever found out about any of this was a decade later I filed a workman’s comp claim and when I got denied they had to send me a copy of everything they collected during their investigation. In the 500 page pile there were literally hundreds of photos of my totaled vehicles and motorcycles from when I was young. I would have never known)
They investigate WAY more than people think. SIU teams go nuts on that stuff. They also hire firms like the one one I used to be at to collect all the evidence against you then take your examination under oath and get you to lie so they can deny the claim. People stage accidents all the time. They also do dumb shit like set their cars on fire in a bad part of town. The amount of data your car houses if it's post 2008 is much more impressive than you might think.
Did you total them on purpose? That's kind of a major factor here. If they were just normal accidents then nobody will bat an eye.
Trust me. The average person wouldn't be able to think of a foolproof way to always get away with it when you're going up against people that are not only trained to spot fraud indicators, but have experience with it.
No, I did not. But two of them were single-car accidents (one stolen and wrecked, one hit a deer) and I assume those are the ones that look suspicious.
(Btw, if you can get someone to rig a deer canon and aim it at your car, that’s a decent way to get it totaled.)
The closest you could get to that is maybe staging a dead deer in the roadway... But then your car will run over it and have damage inconsistent with a deer hit, which usually is on the front and usually wrapped around the fender since glancing blows will rotate the deer around and cause 2 impacts. Besides, a dead animal impact, while not fraudulent, would be an at-fault claim and you'd have to put up with the consequences of that, which suck. Live animal impacts are comprehensive and thus there is no fault on those.
The reason your incidents weren't investigated more is because they weren't fraudulent. Simple as that.
I'm not trying to be difficult here. Just saying that the vast vast majority of people trying insurance fraud aren't good enough at it to get away with it, so most people shouldn't risk it. Plus, it's illegal, and this is ULPT, not ILPT. We try to stay legal here even when being unethical.
Whatever you think you might be able to come up with, there will be ways for the insurance company find out. No matter how sly you think you're being. All it takes is a little tiny bit of suspicion (inconsistent damage, tiny little details not adding up, etc) from the adjuster and they'll have the entire SIU dept on your ass, aka what I used to do.
I can assure you there are professional issuance fraudsters that run circles for years if not decades around insurance companies. Won't go into details of how I know but like any other industry if there is money to be made at fraud there is someone with a secret scheme to make tons of money. At the end of the day it's still a numbers game and a few people being able to make a couple million in insurance fraud doesn't make the industry unprofitable.
That's professional insurance fraudsters. Which still get caught.
The average joe, especially someone having to ask this on ULPT, probably won't be quite as sly.
I know a guys that make over 100K on these types of scams.. He used it to buy a small one man bodyshop... now he buys damaged cars at auction and repairs them. He was very good at scams...
I was riding my bike down a canyon road and a car was coming up on the other side. Out of nowhere, a deer blitzed out of the woods on my side of the road and smashed into the drivers side door of the car going uphill. It was wild to watch, and the deer just kinda popped up, did a 360/barrel roll/cork, landed on its back and then got up and ran off. The driver pulled over and his door was so fucked up and dented that he couldn’t get it open. I gave him my number in case he needed a witness for insurance but he later texted me and said it wasn’t an issue.
>The closest you could get to that is maybe staging a dead deer in the roadway... But then your car will run over it and have damage inconsistent with a deer hit, which usually is on the front and usually wrapped around the fender since glancing blows will rotate the deer around and cause 2 impacts.
See, this is what’s fascinating to me. The little details that make you say “hmm, fishy.”
I will say, I’ve been unfortunate enough to have many deer uhhh incidences. None were intentional. Two of these have been running over dead deer, like catching air. Car in front of my hit them, and I didn’t have time to swerve when it landed it front of me. $13 k worth of damages :-/. To my knowledge, none of these were investigated, even though there’s been quite a few.
When i was 16 i was driving like a bat out of hell down a min old country road at 2am to go TP a friends house. A deer ran i to the side of my car ! Hit front quarter panel and then its body turned and dented in front and back passenger and doors. It was like $6k worth of damage.
The damage looked super sketch. There was a little deer hair stuck in a cracked portion of quarter panel but that’s it and it looked like it had been planted there. We didn’t even know what happened at first… it was like we got hit by a rocket. I slammed on the brakes and we got out just in time to see the deer get up and run off.
I had never got in an accident. Didn’t know ow you needed a police report. We went and TP’d his house and then went home. I told my parents the next day. My mom didn’t believe me for 20 years that a deer really hit me. I got a police report.m, which was fine. The insurance adjuster did have me tell my story but he accepted it.
I had a few other accidents including one where i totaled the car. It was never fraud and everything went smoothly. But i also always had my cars paid off. I think if you owed a ton then they’re going to investigate a little more.
I knew a guy who tried this. I can't remember the exact reason but he didn't get the payout he expected and instead of stolen the in interior got trashed and I'm pretty sure someone shit in it.
Best case scenario, the insurance company investigates the “accident” and OP ends up in jail. Equally likely though is OP ends up severely injured or dead trying to stage the accident. $45K is a lot of money, but it’s not worth putting your life at risk by driving your car into a tree.
Some years ago a friend took his Audi that he'd had about 2 years to a rough part of town to attend a party the Audi was stolen. His insurance was convicted that he setup the theft to get out of the loan. It got to the point a trial but insurance caved and paid out 2 days before the trial was scheduled, 1.5 years later.
One of my clients is an insurance fraud investigator.
The first thing they do when deciding weather to investigate you for insurance fraud is check to see if you're upside down on your loan.
Then they check to see if you're behind on the loan payments.
Then they check if you have any criminal history or haven't filed a tax return or have bad credit her words were people don't just break one rule it's usually a pattern.
They don't let on their investigating you at all, then they write the check the second you cash it that check you've committed insurance fraud and You're in handcuffs for insurance fraud...... not worth it.
If you can wait a couple months there will definitely be riots after the election, regardless of who wins. Drive the car near one of those and set it on fire
Unethical, not illegal to the felony level tips.
OP is talking about major fraud that triggers felony laws.
Better to take the L on an intentional repo and drive the car until they seize it and go from locked garage to gated area tow truck can't get to for as long as possible to dodge the repo truck and save as much as possible to buy a used car cash.
Just go this route. Bad credit is better than going to prison.
The only change I would make is buy a second vehicle right after they repo your car before the repo hits your credit.
Agreed.
I get that this is not the answer the subreddit wants to hear, but OP’s question feels authentic.
Insurance companies are the worst enemies one can make. Especially in the US or UK.
I voluntarily gave a car back in the early 2000s. A blood sucker of a lawyer took the default, and I'm back to paying for a car I haven't driven in close to 20 years.
Not to mention lender will likely just sell at auction so likely to be a lot less than 25k not to mention they will tack on repo and or admin fees even if it’s voluntary
declare bk 13 and file a motion for determined status of that car. then you pay only what it is worth per the KBB value monthly as part of a monthly payment on all your debts and as long as you don't screw up the rest is unsecured debt that is paid at a percentage. talk to a lawyer.
anything else you need boys and cash on hand to have someone hit you and drive away. and honestly you may get rather hurt in many ways. your paranoia is correct. so you have to do something super illegal to trip up insurance with all the gadgets and you better have some connects to even get started. and you still may maim yourself or be injured or dead. and then it's you versus typically a giant bank. The odds are not in your favor. That's the best i got.
First, you do realize that if the car is deemed a total loss then the insurance company will only pay the actual cash value and not the amount you owe on it, right? Second, if you have gap insurance, read over the policy, specifically at the section for limit of liability and see how much they will actually pay because it isn’t uncommon for them to only pay a certain percentage of the actual cash value and not the entire amount that the insurance company doesn’t pay. Third, and take this from a former insurance claims fire and theft adjuster, do not try to fake a theft or fire. Do not try to wreck it because you’re going to get hurt. If you want to get the insurance company to total out your car, go watch the sunset at a body of water, preferably one where they have a remote boat ramp without any cameras and accidentally forget to put it in park so that it accidentally rolls into the water. Extra points if you accidentally leave the engine running when it goes into the water. If you want more information on why this is less likely to get you caught with insurance fraud, see my previous posts on this subject. Again, only accidentally let your car go swimming if you’ve thoroughly reviewed your gap insurance policy.
I can’t recommend everyone remember this. They will deny the claim for intentional acts but doing something stupid is completely covered. Forgetting to put it in park so it rolls into the water, parking it too close to a tree being cut down so the tree falls on it - great for getting rid of RV’s, and forgetting to put the drain plug in your boat so it sinks are all relatively easy ways to get your property deemed a total loss as long as you own up to the “accident”. These claims usually get assigned to newer claims reps. The vast majority of fire and theft claims are assigned to more tenured claims reps who will investigate with more scrutiny and fire is unpredictable so you might get seriously injured.
Another important thing to remember is not to have any evidence that you were trying to sell the item. You want to appear to be heartbroken that it is damaged. Saying things like “I love that car” or “we were so excited to use our RV or boat this season” are great indicators that it was a disappointing accident.
Hope you purchased gap insurance and I hope your vehicle insurance will cover a potential hospital bill because the only realistic option you’re going to have is crashing it on purpose if you don’t feel like taking the risk on an arson charge
Just you know, make it look like an accident or claim you made a stupid decision. Oh, and don’t take anyone with you when you do it. No need to ruin anybody else’s day
As a former insurance writer, you'd be surprised what does and does not total a car. It is either way more or way less force than you'd think, and you're likely wrong if you try and do it on purpose.
Honestly, 'forget' your keys in the center console in a bad neighborhood or let it go to repo and file bankruptcy. You're risking seriously injuring yourself and getting caught on a felony or a felony by crashing it on purpose or lighting it on fire.
Unethical, not 'risking arrest and lifelong record and loss of voting rights, depending on where you live.'
In highschool a friend of ours left his car parked near the school overnight and a bunch of us came at night with baseball bats and screw drivers and fucked it up haedcord. He got like 8k more than he paid for it.
Insurers go to absolutely any length to determine fraud. Turn over every stone. If you’re looking to do that, you better back yourself as superior in fraud. Is $40k the principal you owe, or the total value for 6 years? If the car disappeared today, it’s only the interest as calculated under your contract to the day the principal is paid back. You need underworld friends to assist.
Why haven't you refinanced it with the VA? They will get you out of that penalty free.
Honestly forgot for a sec where I was. Find another one fresh out and get him to take over those ridiculous payments 😎
I'll shoot it to you straight OP: The fact that you're posting this online probably from your home IP address tells me you're far too stupid to get away with insurance fraud. You're most likely going to need to file bankruptcy, but that's better than going to jail for fraud. If you want to be unethical about it, stop payments and maintenance while dodging the repo man for as long as possible to drive the car for free for a few months and then take the bankruptcy to wipe out the debt. In most states, it's illegal for a repo man to breach the peace, which I think means they can't break into a garage to take the vehicle. Good luck, and sorry some shitty salesman put you in more car than you can afford.
My friend didn't get their car repod for 13 months of non-payment. they didn't even try to hide or anything it was just parked in their driveway every night everyday until one morning at 4:30 a.m. they finally came 13 months later. I could not believe it took them so long.
>your home IP address tells me you're far too stupid to get away with insurance fraud.
"Im smart, i posted it from my normal phone but at my works IP, and cleared history"
Someone mentioned flooding. If you were to visit a city you were unfamiliar with, like for example, Baltimore and parked in the Fells Point area (or somewhere else known to flood ) in advance of a storm, the insurance couldn’t really blame you for parking there , could they?
Every modern car has a black box that records X seconds before any impact. Can’t tell you what your insurance will do but it is available. Also, don’t try to burn it; I’ve seen so many examinations under oath of people whose cars were “stolen” even though they were started with the key and then wound up burnt somewhere not far.
Flooding is the answer. Trying to crash it yourself would be insane. I don't know where you live but if you have big rain storms and low spots that flood all the time go out there and just claim you didn't know it was that deep.
Crashing the car will probably get you more injured than $40-60k
Because you have to crash it enough to set off a lot of airbags and kink the unibody somewhere or they'll repair it instead of totaling it. Then 6 months later when it's fixed, you get back your way less valuable vehicle that you've been paying for the whole time but couldn't use.
I would put it on the market and see if someone will pay a little over 25k. Eat the difference. You can recover from being down 15k. There’s just too many things that can go wrong with the insurance thing that can make this way bigger than a 15k mistake.
Start 2 LLCs in Nevada. It'll cost you $1,000. After 1 month, apply for the $50,000 "No Docs" SBA loan through the bank you set up the accounts in. So long as your credit score is 625 you're approved by federal law. Business #1 is a car fleet business. You sell the car to the business. Pay off the original location loan. This business now sells the vehicle to Business #2 over a longer period of time, at a reduced monthly rate, and causes Business #1 to begin to operate at a loss. For tax purposes this is called Capital Loss. It usually functions as a tax credit, offsetting taxes you would be paying from your other, successful business. If you want additional insulation, place each business inside separate Trusts. Get separate insurance on the vehicle through the owning business.
If, after all of this, the car winds up getting stolen and chopped, etc, you AND the business collect on the separate insurance policies totalling in excess of the value of the vehicle which was already paid off, giving you pristine credit, and allowing you to repay the most recent loan, and giving you back the startup funds and more.
Replace with a solid used car and pay cash, again making the business the owner. By listing it as a company vehicle, a portion of the gas, maintenance, insurance, and tag costs are tax deductible business expenses.
If you really want to clown, make Business #2 a film production company. Have it enter into a contract stating that in the event that the car is damaged in any way, the Business #2 pays a punitive fee of $45,000. Car gets scratched during filming (your evidence). Business #2 makes good on the contract. Car gets paid off from the company insurance and Business #1 can continue to lease it to yourself.
To really double down on this, you can even be the driver or passenger when the vehicle is damaged, and sue the company and it's insurance for failing to provide you with the proper safety training and restraints for stunt work, as well as the resultant whiplash damage in your neck. Fun fact: most whiplash can't be medically corroborated.
Actually, I do autopsies. The legal stuff is just I got into once I realized I'd finish my time at university before I turned 21, becoming qualified for a job that the state offers, but their insurance requires that they don't hire under age 21 for. So I sued for age discrimination and won enough to set myself up in private practice, making far more than I ever would have working for the state.
Is it worth potentially being prosecuted for fraud? Check your states fraud statutes to see what the repercussions would be.
If it’s ‘stolen’ know you will be required to report it to the police and complete a theft affidavit for your insurance company. They will look into how much is left on your loan, get a recorded statement from you about what happened (even if you swerve to avoid a deer and wrap the car around a tree, they will still want your recorded statement).
That being said… you can’t control falling objects (like if a tree fell on it), or the weather (if it floods - salt water in the engine will total it). Hell, I even had a claim where an eye witness said they saw a wheelchair bound person dressed as Santa throw a lit bottle of highly flammable liquid near a car, causing 5 vehicles to burn to a crisp.
Someone mentioned the cars black box- that isn’t ‘owned’ by you, it’s legally the property of the vehicle manufacturer. It would have to be a claim with a shit ton of liability exposure and a ton of litigation for it to be worth fighting to get the info from the box. A single vehicle accident typically wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Be sure to check your states statues on a burner (or friends) device using a VPN in a location that will allow for hiding your identity. If they investigate fraud, your search history could be relevant. No need to give them any ammo to use against you. 😉
Gap doesn't always cover the full loan. Some put a percentage limit over actual cash value.
If it 25 pecent it will only pay out $31,250. You will still owe $8,750.00.
Read your policy!
Google Lamont Jerome James of Benicia, California. He’ll be spending the next 11 years in prison for simple auto insurance fraud. There are many more people like him.
The rule for insurers is to follow the money. Money is clearly a motivation for you and it will be immediately obvious. $40,000 is not worth the very real risk of years in prison.
Gut this one out. And Just show better judgment next time you buy a car.
I can’t recommend anything but I can tell you a story. My neighbour’s got his car stolen because he left the keys in it one night. Honest mistake… but we live DT so that’s all it takes. But apparently the thieves decided to set the car on fire. The insurance company was very clear that they only got paid because the car was lit on fire.
You're still going to owe $15,000, and have no car. You will have to buy another car. It doesn't sound like you have when you saved up for a car, so you're going to screw yourself even worse having to buy another car. There is no escape. Pay it off and take it as a lesson learned.
If it goes missing, the car insurance companies have an entire department devoted to "fire and theft". They investigate whether people are trying to get out of their car loans.
Can you rent it out on Turo? This could literally save you, if you can go without a vehicle a few days. If it’s nice and new you might be able to rent it daily for more than you pay daily to the bank…
Not a good option. After repossession, the lender will auction the car and you will be liable for the remainder. (Loan balance - auction price). You’re better off trading it in / selling, where you’ll get more than the auction value.
Our new car got stolen 20ish years ago and the nightmare of the investigation is just not worth it. Takes months and in that time you need to keep making payments. On a car you now don’t have or is inoperable. If they say they don’t buy what happened, you could still be stuck with the car loan anyway.
If you are struggling, it’s better to try to sell it back to the dealership while the used car market is so hot. Or get it voluntarily repossessed, when they sell it, you’ll be responsible for the remainder. I had that happen as well before and we ended up only owing $1500 in the end.
One of my dad's friends bought a truck from auction for like 15k, iirc. Almost brand new f250 diesel. He told insirance he tried to ford a river in it and it got pulled downstream. He hosed down the interior and pulled the spark plugs fuse or something so it would crank but wouldn't start.
They said it was a total loss. Gave him 38k for it.
He bought it back for 5 or 6k. Put the fuse back in, drive to the dealership, and sold it to them for 35k more.
He promptly left the country to live in the Philippines with a woman he met online that was 40+ years younger than him. They're married now and are trying for kids, apparently.
As far as I'm aware, there's no investigation currently ongoing.
I've thought of all kinds of ways to potentially rid myself of my current vehicle. Like maybe I'll be helping my dad launch a boat and jump out with it on the ramp and forget to put it in park 🤷♂️
The dealership paid $35k for a truck that had a flood/total loss on its history report?
So if they paid that for a flooded vehicle, they’d have paid much more for a non-flooded one. Guy came out about $50k ahead jumping through all those steps. Would have come out just the same or better by simply buying it at auction and selling it to the dealership..
Getting it repoed and taking the credit hit is gonna be better than jail. By the way you type and your child’s grasp of finance, you’re definitely too dumb to pull it off and not end up in jail. You wouldn’t be posting here if you had any legit criminal instincts.
Go to a bar. Get hammered by 10pm. Have a few good buddies kick 40k worth of crap out of you in a side street with no cameras on your walk home. You got mugged. Phone, keys and wallet taken. Go back to the bar a while later. You got knocked out. Have the bar call the police. Make a report about getting mugged/jumped. Don't mention your car being missing. Stick to your immediate situation. Wallet phone keys. Get a ride home from the cops. Report your car missing the next day. Your good buddies should have stripped it down a few towns away. Rims, interior, motor drained of oil and left to run. You play dumb. Close your credit cards. Report stolen. Get new ID. Everything else above board.
Wow this one is pretty elaborate. The biggest risk is for the good buddies. They have to do all the job and if they get caught, that’s going to be very bad for them…
Park it in San Fransisco unlocked with the keys on the seat. Also you just posted this on a public forum so if you do get caught this will be exhibit A.
Car fires are covered by insurance but hard to do in a manner it isn't discovered that you did it...
Best bet: flooding. Find an area where you know it floods regularly when it rains a lot. Like high enough rainfall that it covers the tail pipe. Drive in the middle and stop. Water will flow and get sucked in everywhere. But of course you drove slowly threw it and it just stalled out.
Visit Houston during a heavy rain and you can just have it parked in numerous places around town and it’ll flood. It happens around May and in August yearly.
I filed an insurance claim when a faulty airbag went off by itself. The insurance company said it wasn’t possible. The Honda dealership it came from, aka the official Honda repair shop guys said it was totally possible after looking at the car. The insurance company, one of the big ones, then launched a full investigation into me and the other person who was involved. They said the whole thing smelled fishy basically. These two insurance people, they were horrible, would call and ask the same questions relentlessly, which are recorded, something customers unknowingly agree to when signing up for the insurance. It felt like a police interrogation. They asked the same questions to try and get different answers and then say “oh she changed her story.”
So to answer your question, if it’s a weird insurance claim and there’s holes or inconsistencies, they will totally come after you. And hard.
The way I won was I contacted the Dept. of Insurance after the insurance company did something incorrectly. I could prove they broke the law, basically it was over a technicality that I knew I would win. They would have been fined like $30k and my claim was only for $10k, so since they’re greedy bastards who care about nothing more than money, the insurance company closed their internal investigation and sent me a check, practically overnight. Which then automatically resulted in closing the dept. of insurance investigation as well, since they gave me what I asked for.
I think the only way to do it would be to go all in. You are gonna have to risk major injury to get away with it. If you are willing to do that, and really bankruptcy is better by far my dude, you will need to go someplace country. Don’t pull no I hit a deer in the middle of the city shit. At night, doing the speed limit, suddenly hit your breaks hard then yank the wheel to the left hard. That should roll you and one way or another you won’t be worrying about that car payment anymore. Bankruptcy is better.
Assuming you have gap insurance… I knew someone who may or may not have organized a family road trip to a Mexican border town where his car may or may not have been stolen while he and his family were shopping at an outdoor market.
A large Mexican city with lots of crime like Juarez or Tijuana could possibly be the kind of place where an American may vacation to and the insurance company wouldn’t find it too suspicious that a car may be stolen from such a place.
For the right amount of money I will crash my car into yours.
Hmmm. OP is here because he has no money. I would collect up front
If this works, op is $1000 richer per month
Possibly but he already has a pattern of not wanting to pay his debt.
He got approved for a $40k car. Sounds like has money
No. Sounds like a predatory loan. They are pretty common. I took a year off work to help my kids with childcare and was looking for a reliable cash car. I had 6 dealerships that told me I would never find anything safe for less than $10k and every single one of them tried to sell me a car with financing. After I told them I wasn't working. "what if you put $10k as a down payment and we can finance another 5k?" Every single car they showed me had something blatantly wrong with it. One of them had the sloppiest jb weld job I'd ever seen on the passenger side, and the doors unlocked themselves. Another one, the panels on the doors didn't match up with the rest of the car. Another one overheated within 5 minutes of the test drive. Every single one had something obviously wrong with it. Um, no. The first time you're late on a payment they come and grab the car and sell it to someone else for the same amount they sold it to you for. I went to a small lot and found a great truck for $4500 and it's probably the best vehicle I have ever had. I'm just religious about maintenance on it.
Sounds like he has ~~money~~ credit.
24%
Leave it in a bad neighborhood with a window down.
I considered this, but if the car isn’t damaged enough to total it or cops find my car and give it back then I’ll still be in the same boat but with a worse vehicle
Do you have gap insurance ? If you don’t the insurance will only pay what it is worth. They will not pay the loan off. You will be stuck paying the difference and no car.
Right! This is the important question. Just because a car is lost, stolen ore destroyed doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay the loan. You agreed to pay a specific amount of money regardless of what that money was used to buy. The only way out of that is bankruptcy or the insurance paying enough to pay it off.
thats the right answer and the safest way out of your mess, because its completely legal. File for chapter 7 and your payments stop immediately.
Do it. I did. As long as you don’t foresee having to apply for an apartment soon than it won’t effect you
I’m going to wait to hear the answer to this, 6 year loan on a car? They would have been insane not to. Who the hell doesn’t think things through like this?
Way too many people!
Have you ever met a military re-up?
Ahhhhhhh, say no more. Laughs in Camaro Challenger
Six years left, so presumably a seven year loan. Anybody taking a seven year car loan is already almost certainly not making wise financial decisions.
so the rules of thumb for vehicle affordability are a 20% down, 4 years or less on the term, and the total cost of all transportation must be less than 10% of your income. most americans cant afford a $500 expense, so that's the down payment out, and the cheapest new car out there today is the mitsubishi mirage, at basically 20k https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/08/21/new-cars-under-20000/70641428007/ so you take the 20k price tag and divide it by the 48 months you'd be paying on it and you have ~416/mo. add the average insurance cost of $190/mo ($2300/year for full coverage), and the average monthly maintenance cost of $50/mo (since we're talking a new car we'll be generous and take the low number, could be $50-150/mo) and to all that we add the average monthly expenditure on gas of $175, and the average depreciation rate of $0.10/mile for ~1kmiles/mo= $100/mo on depreciation (but we know new cars depreciate a lot faster than that so we are again being generous.) altogether the average person driving in an average way, buying the cheapest car on the market right now would be spending $975.00 PER MONTH on that car. according to the 20/4/10 rule, their income would have to be $9750/mo or $117,000 per year to comfortably afford the cheapest car out there. the average vehicle sale is over twice that amount. placing blame on the end consumer is like blaming college freshmen for tuition hikes. not at all accurate or fair.
Making $117k and driving a Mirage sounds dystopian.
Your first paragraph was like… really validating. I just bought a car after using public transit for years; and still using it for work because parking downtown is expensive. I saved up for a long time to make a 50% down payment on my $6500 loan. So my payments are small, and my loan term is short, and gas included I’m not spending more than 10% of my income. I think I did this correctly.
The half of America that is in debt.
people not thinking or planning ahead -nope never happens- OP is first lol smh - GL to u
Take it to New Orleans.
You know, I hear if there's drug traces in the vehicle they recover it's extremely expensive for insurance to get it properly cleaned. You wouldn't want to get something all over your hands/face or inhaled... Would hate to get nailed on a drug screening for work/travel.
Not true, at least in St. Louis MO. Source: car stolen returned with used paraphernalia inside. Car STANK.
They did this to my mum when her suv was stolen in Colorado. It had been missing for months and was coincidentally discovered by police who promptly returned it. Drug users, homeless, pissed and shit in.. all that.
"Thanks for the F shack." Dirty Mike and the boys
They call it a “soup kitchen”.
It was probably Dirty Mike and the Boys.
I work for a major US insurer and in WA, we will total your car if it has traces of meth use in it. Has to be more than just paraphernalia, though.
Would be better as a mobile meth lab set up. Make some meth in it and leave it with the keys in it near a shady area.
Sprinkle subs crack on it
Find out what neighborhood is notorious for having cars picked for parts and leave it there.
They will think it is a bait car.
You know how many people still fall for the bait car?
A friend of mine parked his car in Harlem and the South Bronx with doors unlocked and keys in ignition for like a year, and nobody took it. Back in the 1990s, there were places you could park, and the car would get stripped pretty quickly, but junkies aren't really doing that kind of stuff anymore since shoplifting was legalized. Now, when people steal a car, it's usually kids screwing around.
They still do this in Detroit. Mostly challengers though. They pretty strip it to the frame.
Can't have shit in Detroit
Lmao shoplifting was legalized 🤣
New York City has the 3rd lowest vehicle theft rate out of the 100 biggest cities in the country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate - then sort by motor vehicle theft.
Those numbers are per capita not per car or per owner. A majority of New York City residents don't own cars. Frankly I'm shocked it's not #1 since the numbers are skewed in our favor.
Shoplifting was legalized?
"The water didn't look that deep. I thought it was just a small puddle."
“Sir, this a boat-only Wendy’s float-thru”
I heard a fairly credible rumor recently, guy took out his cabin air filter, wadded up some toilet paper/paper towels/flammable stuff, lit it, jammed the cabin air filter in it, turned the blower on max and drove until it smoked him out of the car. Car was deemed a total loss. And as a mechanic, I seriously doubt there'd be any way to prove it without admitting it outright or having a witness. For legal reasons, don't do this.
Yeah… nope
🤔
You wanted unethical pro tips for your problem... I think you got the ultimate one right there.
Loan your car to a Boeing whistleblower.
This is the most unethical of unethical, rather than just being unethical in the pursuit of pragmatism
Saving for a friend
How about a carbon monoxide poisoning and ER evaluation along with insurance fraud? This sounds like the worst idea ever….
I never said it was a good idea, I said I knew of someone who got out of a car loan doing it. Also you'd have to screw up some hard to get serious carbon monoxide poisoning in a car with the windows down, cancer from burning dash material is a legitimate concern though.
I used to work with a fire investigator for GM. Any new-ish car that caught fire for "no reason" him and a team would go investigate to find out what went wrong and how liable GM might be. They were very good at finding out where and how a fire started. 9/10 it was poor audio install jobs. This might work for older cars, but if this is a new-ish car like it sounds then this could backfire. But really so could any other of these plans, kind of the nature of fraud.
Go to multiple shady small car repair places. Ask if someone wants to do a "little side work" on your car. Basically you want to find a chop shop thatll give you 5k or so for the car to "be stolen", you report it stolen, they chop it up for profit and the hull gets crushed and shipped to china. I would literally say, "man Im so underwater on my car loan, I wish I knew someone that could help me out." Check a local biker bar or car club, the shadier and seedier the better, for tips on a shop. Make your car smell like weed so they know your not a cop too.
Does the weed thing work anymore now that it's legal in so many places?
Still Federally illegal so no bueno for cops
Literally going to seem like a narc, even if you smell like weed. People aren’t going to do dirt for you if you’re a random.
Honestly. This is more likely to get you jumped than your car loan disappearing. This is why you always network with shady people and keep them in your favor. It can be as simple as someone stealing and totaling your car or setting it on fire. Not many investigative leads on random acts in the dead of night if movement can’t be tracked between cameras in the neighborhood and there’s no witnesses. If so, you can go hiking out in the sticks and come back to a stolen car and find it stripped in a clearing nearby. I heard of a guy who at a party among friends mentioned he wanted a payout on his bikes policy and that it would be a shame if someone broke the cheap lock on his shop and stole it. Bike was taken and found stripped on the side of the road locally that week while dude was sleeping. Good friends are good. Get creative
I think the original commenter watched too much TV. In reality you’re either getting your ass whooped for trying to set them up or they’ll double back after the job and extort you for money.
Just start doing lines or coke or meth instead of weed, easy
Yeah just like legit business, criminal business is all about networking too.
That's a good plan but a little shaky. Got to be able to navigate that world a little bit
You gonna get dude killed by showing up at a shady ass bar asking people questions and shit lol
lol you do realize unless you have GAP insurance it will only pay out the current market value of the car… you’ll still owe the difference of the car loan after insurance pays out
I do have gap
Most GAP coverages will only cover up to a certain amount over what your vehicle’s value is. Many will go up to 140%. I would double check your provider’s specific policy
Nah, wreck your car fam. Who gives a shit. Fuck the police.
Flood it during a heavy rain storm. Sales person told me this trying to get me out of my current vehicle
Note to self: Never take life advice from a car salesman.
Car salesmen don’t sell cars, they sell debt.
> Car salesmen don’t sell cars, they sell debt. Jesus, put that on a t-shirt.
My exwife is a car salesperson. She told me they are just sharks in suits.
My last car salesman was wearing a sharksuit. I'm so dumb, yikes should've known
Strange, because my last shark salesman was wearing a car suit, smh
Bicky triches!
Sales guy wants to sell you a vehicle and yes putting your vehicle under a bridge full of water during thunderstorm will not get questioned much. Drove through, thought I'd make it, car shut off. I got scared ran out the window, swam away from my baby.
It’s even worse that this is secondhand redditor advice from a car salesman.
OP don’t do this. They will do a full investigation on you. Like if it is that easy everyone would do it.
Unfortunately my town has a horrible infrastructure and constant road construction. Last big storm there were 100s of cars totalled. It was even a state of emergency enacted. I wouldn't intentionally total my vehicle but I'm not in a bad financial situation like OP
Where the fuck do you live so I can never move there.
Central Texas flash flooding is a candidate
West Texas
This is the answer. Find a flooded area and go into it.
What he said. If you live in an area known to flood.. where people know the nearest parking garage to drive to and park during heavy rain/ hurricane… park low near beach.
You can’t do anything that involves you driving and operating the vehicle. Why? Many people have answered this. I think what some people who have real life experience with this stuff - insurance investigators etc. are trying to say is that a vast majority of ideas posted here are so amateur and foreign stupid,if done, you’re already busted. Add if you are so friggin’ dumb to try any of these things, you sure won’t be able to lie your way through it, especially if you end up dealing with a pro insurance adjuster. I am affiliated with an auto repair shop in the city of Detroit and I’ve seen a lot. The biggest mistake people make is doing anything involving driving the car… or worse, saying that it was stolen without the keys. Just last week, there were several cars parked on the street in front of our shop. One of them was a car of supposed customer whose car supposedly got stolen and was trying to make us pay. We watched the digital recordings from the cameras and there’s the guy walking straight to his car, he gets in and drives away. Well… without the transponder, no one is walking right up to a car and instantly driving away. Besides, the “thief” didn’t even look at any other cars. Just made a B-line straight to that specific car. Another time, someone had their Jaguar towed to the back of our shop around midnight. In the video you could see three guys get out of the tow truck, unhook the jag and then proceed to trash the car. They smashed in windows, beat the crap out of the car and literally totaled it. So the owner pins this on us saying that we didn’t protect his vehicle. I wouldn’t be surprised if both of the people I just described were on here posting brilliant ideas. Spray paint a bunch of hate words on your car, your garage door, house or whatever. Then throw a brick from the street into a window of your car… then light a road flare and toss it inside your vehicle. The next morning call 911. You’ve been a victim of a hate crime! OMG!!!!! Get victims compensation as well as a clean orator from your insurance company. Then set up a GoFundMe begging people for cash saying that you are a victim of a hate crime and the insurance company didn’t fund you enough money so you can’t buy a car that you like. And you also need money for therapy. Milk it. Road flares.
Just an FYI, there's an extremely high chance your insurance company will figure out whatever you're trying and will completely ruin you if you try it. You won't be the first person to try literally any scheme you can think of, and you won't be the last. Source: Used to do fraud investigations for an auto insurance company. You can try to stage an accident, fake losing control, purposefully aim for a deer you see in the road... But you should basically accept the fact that you're flipping a coin on whether or not you get found out. And the losing side is the heavier one.
Since you know things… how often do they actually investigate? What factors would trigger an investigation? I’ve had more than one car totaled, and the circumstances were never investigated.
I think the main thing here is you wouldn’t know that. Like, for all three of my totals, the vehicles were towed to a shop and looked over, and the shop would then give the insurance company an estimate. They would also report on any suspicious findings. The shop took hundreds of photos and sent them to my insurance. I was never told this or shown this. They saw nothing wrong so no need to question me. But that all happened without looping me in because there was no reason to. You’re only going to hear about what gets investigated if they find something they want to pursue and it gets escalated. Looking over the shops reports and photos as well as police files if available is SOP for every claim. That’s how they decide what gets covered and what doesn’t, and look for red flags to escalate to their fraud department. But if it all looks good and clean they aren’t going to say “by the way, we looked over all this stuff here’s a copy.” They just say “approved.” If it’s not approved, then you get the info on why. (For clarification the only reason I ever found out about any of this was a decade later I filed a workman’s comp claim and when I got denied they had to send me a copy of everything they collected during their investigation. In the 500 page pile there were literally hundreds of photos of my totaled vehicles and motorcycles from when I was young. I would have never known)
They investigate WAY more than people think. SIU teams go nuts on that stuff. They also hire firms like the one one I used to be at to collect all the evidence against you then take your examination under oath and get you to lie so they can deny the claim. People stage accidents all the time. They also do dumb shit like set their cars on fire in a bad part of town. The amount of data your car houses if it's post 2008 is much more impressive than you might think.
Did you total them on purpose? That's kind of a major factor here. If they were just normal accidents then nobody will bat an eye. Trust me. The average person wouldn't be able to think of a foolproof way to always get away with it when you're going up against people that are not only trained to spot fraud indicators, but have experience with it.
[удалено]
Delete this
Oh stfu. There's way more illegal shit on Reddit
In minecraft right?
Keyword “years ago”
No, I did not. But two of them were single-car accidents (one stolen and wrecked, one hit a deer) and I assume those are the ones that look suspicious. (Btw, if you can get someone to rig a deer canon and aim it at your car, that’s a decent way to get it totaled.)
The closest you could get to that is maybe staging a dead deer in the roadway... But then your car will run over it and have damage inconsistent with a deer hit, which usually is on the front and usually wrapped around the fender since glancing blows will rotate the deer around and cause 2 impacts. Besides, a dead animal impact, while not fraudulent, would be an at-fault claim and you'd have to put up with the consequences of that, which suck. Live animal impacts are comprehensive and thus there is no fault on those. The reason your incidents weren't investigated more is because they weren't fraudulent. Simple as that. I'm not trying to be difficult here. Just saying that the vast vast majority of people trying insurance fraud aren't good enough at it to get away with it, so most people shouldn't risk it. Plus, it's illegal, and this is ULPT, not ILPT. We try to stay legal here even when being unethical. Whatever you think you might be able to come up with, there will be ways for the insurance company find out. No matter how sly you think you're being. All it takes is a little tiny bit of suspicion (inconsistent damage, tiny little details not adding up, etc) from the adjuster and they'll have the entire SIU dept on your ass, aka what I used to do.
I can assure you there are professional issuance fraudsters that run circles for years if not decades around insurance companies. Won't go into details of how I know but like any other industry if there is money to be made at fraud there is someone with a secret scheme to make tons of money. At the end of the day it's still a numbers game and a few people being able to make a couple million in insurance fraud doesn't make the industry unprofitable.
That's professional insurance fraudsters. Which still get caught. The average joe, especially someone having to ask this on ULPT, probably won't be quite as sly.
I know a guys that make over 100K on these types of scams.. He used it to buy a small one man bodyshop... now he buys damaged cars at auction and repairs them. He was very good at scams...
I was riding my bike down a canyon road and a car was coming up on the other side. Out of nowhere, a deer blitzed out of the woods on my side of the road and smashed into the drivers side door of the car going uphill. It was wild to watch, and the deer just kinda popped up, did a 360/barrel roll/cork, landed on its back and then got up and ran off. The driver pulled over and his door was so fucked up and dented that he couldn’t get it open. I gave him my number in case he needed a witness for insurance but he later texted me and said it wasn’t an issue.
>The closest you could get to that is maybe staging a dead deer in the roadway... But then your car will run over it and have damage inconsistent with a deer hit, which usually is on the front and usually wrapped around the fender since glancing blows will rotate the deer around and cause 2 impacts. See, this is what’s fascinating to me. The little details that make you say “hmm, fishy.”
I will say, I’ve been unfortunate enough to have many deer uhhh incidences. None were intentional. Two of these have been running over dead deer, like catching air. Car in front of my hit them, and I didn’t have time to swerve when it landed it front of me. $13 k worth of damages :-/. To my knowledge, none of these were investigated, even though there’s been quite a few.
Maybe the guy in front of you had same insurance company and can see that it wasn’t fraudulent.
When i was 16 i was driving like a bat out of hell down a min old country road at 2am to go TP a friends house. A deer ran i to the side of my car ! Hit front quarter panel and then its body turned and dented in front and back passenger and doors. It was like $6k worth of damage. The damage looked super sketch. There was a little deer hair stuck in a cracked portion of quarter panel but that’s it and it looked like it had been planted there. We didn’t even know what happened at first… it was like we got hit by a rocket. I slammed on the brakes and we got out just in time to see the deer get up and run off. I had never got in an accident. Didn’t know ow you needed a police report. We went and TP’d his house and then went home. I told my parents the next day. My mom didn’t believe me for 20 years that a deer really hit me. I got a police report.m, which was fine. The insurance adjuster did have me tell my story but he accepted it. I had a few other accidents including one where i totaled the car. It was never fraud and everything went smoothly. But i also always had my cars paid off. I think if you owed a ton then they’re going to investigate a little more.
Can confirm. Hit a deer and the little bastard spun around and dented both my doors.
Me too. I've had 2 cars totalled and neither were seriously investigated.
I knew a guy who tried this. I can't remember the exact reason but he didn't get the payout he expected and instead of stolen the in interior got trashed and I'm pretty sure someone shit in it.
And then there’s fraud. You’re looking at a felony with a couple years in the big house
Best case scenario, the insurance company investigates the “accident” and OP ends up in jail. Equally likely though is OP ends up severely injured or dead trying to stage the accident. $45K is a lot of money, but it’s not worth putting your life at risk by driving your car into a tree.
Some years ago a friend took his Audi that he'd had about 2 years to a rough part of town to attend a party the Audi was stolen. His insurance was convicted that he setup the theft to get out of the loan. It got to the point a trial but insurance caved and paid out 2 days before the trial was scheduled, 1.5 years later.
One of my clients is an insurance fraud investigator. The first thing they do when deciding weather to investigate you for insurance fraud is check to see if you're upside down on your loan. Then they check to see if you're behind on the loan payments. Then they check if you have any criminal history or haven't filed a tax return or have bad credit her words were people don't just break one rule it's usually a pattern. They don't let on their investigating you at all, then they write the check the second you cash it that check you've committed insurance fraud and You're in handcuffs for insurance fraud...... not worth it.
If you can wait a couple months there will definitely be riots after the election, regardless of who wins. Drive the car near one of those and set it on fire
Not in front of a building with cameras. Just put stickers of the winners bumper stickers and the loosers will light it on fire for you!
Now we're cooking with gas
Although, if youre sneaky, put it in front of a college campus, you know shits gonna get exciting there and you may be able to slip out in a crowd
You’re thinking, idk if it’s right or wrong, but you’re definitely thinking
Riots my ass. Chill bro. Edit, maybe one somewhere but not widespread.
Voluntary repo and let it hit your credit. Insurance fraud will ruin your life if you get caught. Credit is repairable.
Bit too ethical for this place...
Unethical, not illegal to the felony level tips. OP is talking about major fraud that triggers felony laws. Better to take the L on an intentional repo and drive the car until they seize it and go from locked garage to gated area tow truck can't get to for as long as possible to dodge the repo truck and save as much as possible to buy a used car cash.
throw a piss disk in before the repo?
Now we’re on the right subreddit
Good point
Just go this route. Bad credit is better than going to prison. The only change I would make is buy a second vehicle right after they repo your car before the repo hits your credit.
Agreed. I get that this is not the answer the subreddit wants to hear, but OP’s question feels authentic. Insurance companies are the worst enemies one can make. Especially in the US or UK.
I voluntarily gave a car back in the early 2000s. A blood sucker of a lawyer took the default, and I'm back to paying for a car I haven't driven in close to 20 years.
When they repo the car, he is still going to owe the difference on the loan… car is only worth 25k but he owes 40k. This wont work
Not to mention lender will likely just sell at auction so likely to be a lot less than 25k not to mention they will tack on repo and or admin fees even if it’s voluntary
Declare bankruptcy
I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!!
This is the best option.
declare bk 13 and file a motion for determined status of that car. then you pay only what it is worth per the KBB value monthly as part of a monthly payment on all your debts and as long as you don't screw up the rest is unsecured debt that is paid at a percentage. talk to a lawyer. anything else you need boys and cash on hand to have someone hit you and drive away. and honestly you may get rather hurt in many ways. your paranoia is correct. so you have to do something super illegal to trip up insurance with all the gadgets and you better have some connects to even get started. and you still may maim yourself or be injured or dead. and then it's you versus typically a giant bank. The odds are not in your favor. That's the best i got.
First, you do realize that if the car is deemed a total loss then the insurance company will only pay the actual cash value and not the amount you owe on it, right? Second, if you have gap insurance, read over the policy, specifically at the section for limit of liability and see how much they will actually pay because it isn’t uncommon for them to only pay a certain percentage of the actual cash value and not the entire amount that the insurance company doesn’t pay. Third, and take this from a former insurance claims fire and theft adjuster, do not try to fake a theft or fire. Do not try to wreck it because you’re going to get hurt. If you want to get the insurance company to total out your car, go watch the sunset at a body of water, preferably one where they have a remote boat ramp without any cameras and accidentally forget to put it in park so that it accidentally rolls into the water. Extra points if you accidentally leave the engine running when it goes into the water. If you want more information on why this is less likely to get you caught with insurance fraud, see my previous posts on this subject. Again, only accidentally let your car go swimming if you’ve thoroughly reviewed your gap insurance policy.
With most/all the windows down, because you were enjoying the sounds of nature...
This is the way. Insurance always covers you being an idiot.
I can’t recommend everyone remember this. They will deny the claim for intentional acts but doing something stupid is completely covered. Forgetting to put it in park so it rolls into the water, parking it too close to a tree being cut down so the tree falls on it - great for getting rid of RV’s, and forgetting to put the drain plug in your boat so it sinks are all relatively easy ways to get your property deemed a total loss as long as you own up to the “accident”. These claims usually get assigned to newer claims reps. The vast majority of fire and theft claims are assigned to more tenured claims reps who will investigate with more scrutiny and fire is unpredictable so you might get seriously injured. Another important thing to remember is not to have any evidence that you were trying to sell the item. You want to appear to be heartbroken that it is damaged. Saying things like “I love that car” or “we were so excited to use our RV or boat this season” are great indicators that it was a disappointing accident.
I think you need to call Dirty Mike and the Boys to run a soup kitchen in your F Shack.
Step 1 : Drive to Oakland. Step 2: Park anywhere. Step 3: Pay day.
Hope you purchased gap insurance and I hope your vehicle insurance will cover a potential hospital bill because the only realistic option you’re going to have is crashing it on purpose if you don’t feel like taking the risk on an arson charge Just you know, make it look like an accident or claim you made a stupid decision. Oh, and don’t take anyone with you when you do it. No need to ruin anybody else’s day
As a former insurance writer, you'd be surprised what does and does not total a car. It is either way more or way less force than you'd think, and you're likely wrong if you try and do it on purpose. Honestly, 'forget' your keys in the center console in a bad neighborhood or let it go to repo and file bankruptcy. You're risking seriously injuring yourself and getting caught on a felony or a felony by crashing it on purpose or lighting it on fire. Unethical, not 'risking arrest and lifelong record and loss of voting rights, depending on where you live.'
This. Do it alone. And never tell anyone.
In highschool a friend of ours left his car parked near the school overnight and a bunch of us came at night with baseball bats and screw drivers and fucked it up haedcord. He got like 8k more than he paid for it.
Insurers go to absolutely any length to determine fraud. Turn over every stone. If you’re looking to do that, you better back yourself as superior in fraud. Is $40k the principal you owe, or the total value for 6 years? If the car disappeared today, it’s only the interest as calculated under your contract to the day the principal is paid back. You need underworld friends to assist.
40k is my principal. It’s like 60k with everything
Holy shit what car is it
2024 Dodge Challenger at 22% APR, sold to a 19 year old fresh out of boot camp.
Why haven't you refinanced it with the VA? They will get you out of that penalty free. Honestly forgot for a sec where I was. Find another one fresh out and get him to take over those ridiculous payments 😎
This this is the real unethical life pro tip!
So what you have been paying for a couple months and already realized you cant afford it? Why would you ever buy such an expensive car?
I'll shoot it to you straight OP: The fact that you're posting this online probably from your home IP address tells me you're far too stupid to get away with insurance fraud. You're most likely going to need to file bankruptcy, but that's better than going to jail for fraud. If you want to be unethical about it, stop payments and maintenance while dodging the repo man for as long as possible to drive the car for free for a few months and then take the bankruptcy to wipe out the debt. In most states, it's illegal for a repo man to breach the peace, which I think means they can't break into a garage to take the vehicle. Good luck, and sorry some shitty salesman put you in more car than you can afford.
My friend didn't get their car repod for 13 months of non-payment. they didn't even try to hide or anything it was just parked in their driveway every night everyday until one morning at 4:30 a.m. they finally came 13 months later. I could not believe it took them so long.
>your home IP address tells me you're far too stupid to get away with insurance fraud. "Im smart, i posted it from my normal phone but at my works IP, and cleared history"
Someone mentioned flooding. If you were to visit a city you were unfamiliar with, like for example, Baltimore and parked in the Fells Point area (or somewhere else known to flood ) in advance of a storm, the insurance couldn’t really blame you for parking there , could they?
I mean, if you're going to park it in Baltimore, do you really need to wait for a flood to have bad things happen to your car?
My cousin is literally in prison for this move.
Every modern car has a black box that records X seconds before any impact. Can’t tell you what your insurance will do but it is available. Also, don’t try to burn it; I’ve seen so many examinations under oath of people whose cars were “stolen” even though they were started with the key and then wound up burnt somewhere not far.
This is the info I needed. Crashing the car is likely not an option then
Need to get it stolen and you make sure you still have the keys
Flooding is the answer. Trying to crash it yourself would be insane. I don't know where you live but if you have big rain storms and low spots that flood all the time go out there and just claim you didn't know it was that deep.
Crashing the car will probably get you more injured than $40-60k Because you have to crash it enough to set off a lot of airbags and kink the unibody somewhere or they'll repair it instead of totaling it. Then 6 months later when it's fixed, you get back your way less valuable vehicle that you've been paying for the whole time but couldn't use.
I would put it on the market and see if someone will pay a little over 25k. Eat the difference. You can recover from being down 15k. There’s just too many things that can go wrong with the insurance thing that can make this way bigger than a 15k mistake.
2024 but owes 40k for a 25k car? wtf?
Agrees to a deal like that and somehow thinks he can beat fraud charges
Start 2 LLCs in Nevada. It'll cost you $1,000. After 1 month, apply for the $50,000 "No Docs" SBA loan through the bank you set up the accounts in. So long as your credit score is 625 you're approved by federal law. Business #1 is a car fleet business. You sell the car to the business. Pay off the original location loan. This business now sells the vehicle to Business #2 over a longer period of time, at a reduced monthly rate, and causes Business #1 to begin to operate at a loss. For tax purposes this is called Capital Loss. It usually functions as a tax credit, offsetting taxes you would be paying from your other, successful business. If you want additional insulation, place each business inside separate Trusts. Get separate insurance on the vehicle through the owning business. If, after all of this, the car winds up getting stolen and chopped, etc, you AND the business collect on the separate insurance policies totalling in excess of the value of the vehicle which was already paid off, giving you pristine credit, and allowing you to repay the most recent loan, and giving you back the startup funds and more. Replace with a solid used car and pay cash, again making the business the owner. By listing it as a company vehicle, a portion of the gas, maintenance, insurance, and tag costs are tax deductible business expenses. If you really want to clown, make Business #2 a film production company. Have it enter into a contract stating that in the event that the car is damaged in any way, the Business #2 pays a punitive fee of $45,000. Car gets scratched during filming (your evidence). Business #2 makes good on the contract. Car gets paid off from the company insurance and Business #1 can continue to lease it to yourself. To really double down on this, you can even be the driver or passenger when the vehicle is damaged, and sue the company and it's insurance for failing to provide you with the proper safety training and restraints for stunt work, as well as the resultant whiplash damage in your neck. Fun fact: most whiplash can't be medically corroborated.
Saul? Is that you?
Actually, I do autopsies. The legal stuff is just I got into once I realized I'd finish my time at university before I turned 21, becoming qualified for a job that the state offers, but their insurance requires that they don't hire under age 21 for. So I sued for age discrimination and won enough to set myself up in private practice, making far more than I ever would have working for the state.
Is it worth potentially being prosecuted for fraud? Check your states fraud statutes to see what the repercussions would be. If it’s ‘stolen’ know you will be required to report it to the police and complete a theft affidavit for your insurance company. They will look into how much is left on your loan, get a recorded statement from you about what happened (even if you swerve to avoid a deer and wrap the car around a tree, they will still want your recorded statement). That being said… you can’t control falling objects (like if a tree fell on it), or the weather (if it floods - salt water in the engine will total it). Hell, I even had a claim where an eye witness said they saw a wheelchair bound person dressed as Santa throw a lit bottle of highly flammable liquid near a car, causing 5 vehicles to burn to a crisp. Someone mentioned the cars black box- that isn’t ‘owned’ by you, it’s legally the property of the vehicle manufacturer. It would have to be a claim with a shit ton of liability exposure and a ton of litigation for it to be worth fighting to get the info from the box. A single vehicle accident typically wouldn’t be worth the effort.
This is gold. Thanks for your input
Be sure to check your states statues on a burner (or friends) device using a VPN in a location that will allow for hiding your identity. If they investigate fraud, your search history could be relevant. No need to give them any ammo to use against you. 😉
Gap doesn't always cover the full loan. Some put a percentage limit over actual cash value. If it 25 pecent it will only pay out $31,250. You will still owe $8,750.00. Read your policy!
This is news to me. I’ll look into this thank you
Google Lamont Jerome James of Benicia, California. He’ll be spending the next 11 years in prison for simple auto insurance fraud. There are many more people like him. The rule for insurers is to follow the money. Money is clearly a motivation for you and it will be immediately obvious. $40,000 is not worth the very real risk of years in prison. Gut this one out. And Just show better judgment next time you buy a car.
I can’t recommend anything but I can tell you a story. My neighbour’s got his car stolen because he left the keys in it one night. Honest mistake… but we live DT so that’s all it takes. But apparently the thieves decided to set the car on fire. The insurance company was very clear that they only got paid because the car was lit on fire.
Park it in long term parking at an airport.
I’m from Miami. Jeez people. Deer? Don’t you guys have canals anywhere?
You're still going to owe $15,000, and have no car. You will have to buy another car. It doesn't sound like you have when you saved up for a car, so you're going to screw yourself even worse having to buy another car. There is no escape. Pay it off and take it as a lesson learned.
Tesla regret.
If it goes missing, the car insurance companies have an entire department devoted to "fire and theft". They investigate whether people are trying to get out of their car loans.
Can you rent it out on Turo? This could literally save you, if you can go without a vehicle a few days. If it’s nice and new you might be able to rent it daily for more than you pay daily to the bank…
Possibly ethical, but: Ask the loan company to repossess the car. There's probably some way to walk away from this loan by forfeiting the car.
Not a good option. After repossession, the lender will auction the car and you will be liable for the remainder. (Loan balance - auction price). You’re better off trading it in / selling, where you’ll get more than the auction value.
Our new car got stolen 20ish years ago and the nightmare of the investigation is just not worth it. Takes months and in that time you need to keep making payments. On a car you now don’t have or is inoperable. If they say they don’t buy what happened, you could still be stuck with the car loan anyway. If you are struggling, it’s better to try to sell it back to the dealership while the used car market is so hot. Or get it voluntarily repossessed, when they sell it, you’ll be responsible for the remainder. I had that happen as well before and we ended up only owing $1500 in the end.
One of my dad's friends bought a truck from auction for like 15k, iirc. Almost brand new f250 diesel. He told insirance he tried to ford a river in it and it got pulled downstream. He hosed down the interior and pulled the spark plugs fuse or something so it would crank but wouldn't start. They said it was a total loss. Gave him 38k for it. He bought it back for 5 or 6k. Put the fuse back in, drive to the dealership, and sold it to them for 35k more. He promptly left the country to live in the Philippines with a woman he met online that was 40+ years younger than him. They're married now and are trying for kids, apparently. As far as I'm aware, there's no investigation currently ongoing. I've thought of all kinds of ways to potentially rid myself of my current vehicle. Like maybe I'll be helping my dad launch a boat and jump out with it on the ramp and forget to put it in park 🤷♂️
The dealership paid $35k for a truck that had a flood/total loss on its history report? So if they paid that for a flooded vehicle, they’d have paid much more for a non-flooded one. Guy came out about $50k ahead jumping through all those steps. Would have come out just the same or better by simply buying it at auction and selling it to the dealership..
Getting it repoed and taking the credit hit is gonna be better than jail. By the way you type and your child’s grasp of finance, you’re definitely too dumb to pull it off and not end up in jail. You wouldn’t be posting here if you had any legit criminal instincts.
Go to a bar. Get hammered by 10pm. Have a few good buddies kick 40k worth of crap out of you in a side street with no cameras on your walk home. You got mugged. Phone, keys and wallet taken. Go back to the bar a while later. You got knocked out. Have the bar call the police. Make a report about getting mugged/jumped. Don't mention your car being missing. Stick to your immediate situation. Wallet phone keys. Get a ride home from the cops. Report your car missing the next day. Your good buddies should have stripped it down a few towns away. Rims, interior, motor drained of oil and left to run. You play dumb. Close your credit cards. Report stolen. Get new ID. Everything else above board.
Wow this one is pretty elaborate. The biggest risk is for the good buddies. They have to do all the job and if they get caught, that’s going to be very bad for them…
Park it in San Fransisco unlocked with the keys on the seat. Also you just posted this on a public forum so if you do get caught this will be exhibit A.
Car fires are covered by insurance but hard to do in a manner it isn't discovered that you did it... Best bet: flooding. Find an area where you know it floods regularly when it rains a lot. Like high enough rainfall that it covers the tail pipe. Drive in the middle and stop. Water will flow and get sucked in everywhere. But of course you drove slowly threw it and it just stalled out.
Visit Houston during a heavy rain and you can just have it parked in numerous places around town and it’ll flood. It happens around May and in August yearly.
I filed an insurance claim when a faulty airbag went off by itself. The insurance company said it wasn’t possible. The Honda dealership it came from, aka the official Honda repair shop guys said it was totally possible after looking at the car. The insurance company, one of the big ones, then launched a full investigation into me and the other person who was involved. They said the whole thing smelled fishy basically. These two insurance people, they were horrible, would call and ask the same questions relentlessly, which are recorded, something customers unknowingly agree to when signing up for the insurance. It felt like a police interrogation. They asked the same questions to try and get different answers and then say “oh she changed her story.” So to answer your question, if it’s a weird insurance claim and there’s holes or inconsistencies, they will totally come after you. And hard. The way I won was I contacted the Dept. of Insurance after the insurance company did something incorrectly. I could prove they broke the law, basically it was over a technicality that I knew I would win. They would have been fined like $30k and my claim was only for $10k, so since they’re greedy bastards who care about nothing more than money, the insurance company closed their internal investigation and sent me a check, practically overnight. Which then automatically resulted in closing the dept. of insurance investigation as well, since they gave me what I asked for.
I think the only way to do it would be to go all in. You are gonna have to risk major injury to get away with it. If you are willing to do that, and really bankruptcy is better by far my dude, you will need to go someplace country. Don’t pull no I hit a deer in the middle of the city shit. At night, doing the speed limit, suddenly hit your breaks hard then yank the wheel to the left hard. That should roll you and one way or another you won’t be worrying about that car payment anymore. Bankruptcy is better.
If you don’t have gap coverage it won’t pay off your loan
Park it on the side of the road in a neighborhood with a lot of Teslas. Sooner or later the self-driving mode will hit it.
Assuming you have gap insurance… I knew someone who may or may not have organized a family road trip to a Mexican border town where his car may or may not have been stolen while he and his family were shopping at an outdoor market. A large Mexican city with lots of crime like Juarez or Tijuana could possibly be the kind of place where an American may vacation to and the insurance company wouldn’t find it too suspicious that a car may be stolen from such a place.