Advice please - car insurance claim against us

dacouch

Crapgame wrote: »

Contact your insurer and see what their intentions are or likely to be. Tell them you caused no damage, and there is no evidence to suggest you did. Tell both insurance companies you believe he is trying a false claim and you do not intend to help him do that. The insurers should check the guys details and see if he has any other claims. Carefully check any and all insurance policies you have, you may have a bolt on £10000 (or whatever) of legal cover. If you have that, use it.
Try to find out if the garage giving the quote is 'authorised' by your insurers. Insist on more than one quote if it comes down to it. Examine any quotes to see exactly what work they intend to do. See if you can get a copy of exactly what he has put in writing to his/your insurance company.
If you are an AA/RAC/Motoring Organisation member, or in a Trade Union, see how much help you can get from them.
Be prepared to fight all the way - especially if your insurance company try to take the lazy way out and just accept this man at his word. They shouldn't do. They should be looking for evidence from him, but it might be down to you to question everything.
Curiously, it looks like the £500 claim is around the average 'excess'. Perhaps you were supposed to settle without involving insurance? You know, so you don't lose your no claims discount?
I would contact the police local to where the incident took place. They won't be very interested in doing anything, but ask them to record your call and give you a reference number. Tell them you believe an attempt fraud is taking place, they are obliged to take the details, even if they do nothing else. At least then the old bill will have details of this man and his car, and hopefully will get on his case if he makes his living this way. (There was some foreign bloke got some serious jail time recently for false claims)

The only problem with this advice is any Legal Protection Cover policies you are referring to are to pursue recover of uninsured losses such as injuries and excesses when an accident is not your fault. They will not get involved unless they feel you have over around 51% chance of making a recover from the other party.

For a claim of £500 the Insurers will simply pay the claim as it is not economical to defend the claim. To repair a scratch / dent it does not look that expensive as it is probably to supply and spray the damaged panel

Pitlanepiglet

Photographs, photographs, photographs. I deal with the legal side of claims like these and the best thing you can do if you have an incident, no matter how minor is to take photos. In many cases it will persuade the Claimant that there are bigger mugs out there to go after and if not it will give your insurers something to work with to deny your claim.

I suspect they may just pay this one, you admit the door hit theirs and you can't entirely be sure what damage was caused. Asked the insurers to get the engineers report from the TP insurers along with any photo's of the damage.