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This blog was co-authored by Charlotte Plant, Solicitor Apprentice.
A phantom passenger claim in its simplest form is an injury claim from a person that was not present in a vehicle involved in a crash. It is certainly one of the more brazen ways to pursue a fraudulent injury claim by attempting to circumvent any fraud detection process and acquire a quick compensation pay out.
Identifying claims for further investigation can be as straightforward as noticing that there are more claimants than seats in a vehicle, the at-fault driver disputing the presence of a passenger, or there are photographs / video footage showing vehicle occupancy.
Often the fraud is more covert, but the clues will be in the finer details that can easily be overlooked without a proper triage. There may be inconsistent reporting of accident circumstances, weather, vehicle speeds or seating position in a vehicle. There may be seemingly no apparent connection between the occupants of a vehicle, or the purpose of the journey makes no sense. There may be one passenger that did not seek any medical attention with all of the others attending the same hospital, for example.
Those enabling claims sometimes cite their poor drafting of Claim Notification Forms [CNFs] in an attempt to explain discrepancies on vehicle occupancy. However, a CNF is a document that has to be verified with a statement of truth and therefore attracts the same weight as a statement of case. We have previously discussed how Courts expect CNFs to be reliable documents to be taken seriously, in this blog.
One of these factors alone may not be necessarily be indicative of fraud but a few coupled together and phantom passengers start to “appear”.
A targeted investigation is key to build on the initial concerns and generate tangible evidence. Gathering and then assessing the strength of evidence, pre-litigation, is crucial and if the evidence withstands scrutiny, it is likely to prove persuasive and those phantom passengers will “disappear” as quickly as they “appeared”.
A reliable and thoroughly proofed witness can be crucial to defeating a phantom passenger claim, but not always. A star witness can overcome any credibility a phantom passenger may cling to, but equally there may be sufficient other evidence to damage the credibility of a claimant beyond repair.
Any phantom passenger bold enough to progress their claim to trial has to, in the first instance, prove their claim. This means proving:
- Presence in the vehicle at all material times
- The accident circumstances
- The force of impact
- Body movement and displacement in the vehicle
- The injuries suffered
- Period of injury
A passenger that was not involved in the accident will find it difficult to convincingly explain any, let all alone, of the above. It’s a very difficult task to make all of that up and stick to a consistent story throughout, especially if the passengers have no connection to each other and do not rehearse in advance. Even then, “scripted” versions of events will sound formulaic.
There are sometimes claimants that were genuinely present in a vehicle and genuinely injured, but support a phantom passenger claim. It is established law that those “genuine” claimants will also be found fundamentally dishonest.
In our next blog, we will feature one of our recent trial successes under this umbrella.
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