You might see somebody carry out a dangerous manoeuvre on a roundabout and conclude that they don’t know how to use one, but you could be seriously wrong…
Yes, there are a growing number of accidents on roundabouts that are deliberate in order to work an insurance scam, and the latest hotspot is Granada; the city, that is, not down here on the coast, but even so…
The normal ‘targets’ are elderly drivers and the villains either drive around and around along the outside lane, waiting for a chance to force a collision, or they wait, parked up near the entrance to a roundabout.
The procedure is to wait until somebody wants move out of the inside lane to leave the roundabout and then accelerate to clip them as they come across their ‘bows.’
The collision is normally sufficiently hard for the swindler to claim that he has been injured – although always something not visibly apparent.
According to the Spanish Highway Code, the victim is the guilty party, so to avoid waiting for the police to turn up they normally sign a ‘mutual declaration report.’ The fraudster phones for an ambulance so that they can be taken to a medical centre and claim an injury and thus have an official medical report to back their consequent injuries claim.
As said earlier in the article, this scam has been taking place in Granada and the Guardia Civil de Tráfico have been investigating related individuals who have allegedly been faking accidents (because accidental they are not) and receiving 90,000 euros through insurance claims.
The police investigation began after several motor-insurance companies in the north of Spain reported a host of suspicious accidents, all occurring on the same spot in Vigo: on the roundabout on the Avda. Castelao. In all of these insurance claims the damages to the car were light but ‘curiously’ enough all the claimants just happened to have suffered injuries.
Here is a video of a roundabout accident, which we hasten to point out is not one of these provoked accidents, but a real one
(News: Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)