A man in his mid-fifties was facing the Zurich judiciary for the murder of his wife. However, the case was initially dropped because the authorities assumed it was an accident.

The trial which began this spring in Meilen (ZH) almost never took place. The 50-year-old defendant is accused of having killed his wife in April 2014. At first, he had managed to make investigators believe that his wife had died accidentally, reports the “Tages-Anzeiger”.

According to the indictment, it all started at the end of 2012. The couple were struggling and the woman had first raised her wishes to initiate divorce proceedings. One evening in December, a violent argument allegedly broke out in the couple’s holiday home in Mallorca (Spain). The man allegedly hit his wife in the face, breaking several bones. Then, he got behind the wheel of his car before hitting his wife, who was standing in front of a small wall at the bottom of their house. Her legs had been totally crushed. The accused then entered the house to open a window about 4 meters above where she was lying. Finally, he would have driven away with their son, leaving his seriously injured wife in the cold.

The prosecution is convinced that he intended to let her die there. The fifty-year-old had indeed waited more than three hours before contacting the emergency services, explaining to them that his wife had fallen from the window after having had an epileptic seizure. Despite the gravity of the facts, she had survived.

For reasons unknown, the woman returned to live with her husband after leaving the rehabilitation clinic. She hadn’t filed a complaint against him either. A decision that turned out to be fraught with consequences. Because, in April 2014, her husband had once again attacked her. In Switzerland, this time, at their home in the canton of Zurich. According to the indictment, he poured hot water on her back, before taking her to the bathroom and drowning her in the tub which he then filled with hot water. His goal: to make believe that his wife had fallen in the bathtub. Once again, the prosecution closed the case after a few months, believing it to be an accident. The investigators had in particular been reinforced in their theory by the Spanish medical reports, which had not revealed any indication suggesting an act of violence.

It was thanks to the tenacity of an insurance employee that the case was finally handled by the Zurich courts. The husband had indeed taken out life insurance for half a million francs for his wife. A day after the death of his wife, he contacted the insurance to collect the money. He then bombarded the employee with calls and emails in order to collect the insurance money. It did not take more for the employee to suspect something. She then went through the old medical files, finding some disturbing elements. Reason for which she asked that an expertise be made. It is thanks to the latter that justice once again seized the case.

The Meilen District Court found the 50-year-old man guilty of attempted and completed murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The verdict is not yet final. In addition to the guilty verdicts for murder, the court found the man guilty of attempted fraud for trying to collect on her life insurance policy. A partial acquittal was made on the charge of completed fraud.

With its verdict, the court largely followed the prosecutor’s requests. The defense of the man, who did not confess, will appeal the verdict to the higher court.

Would you give up your hand for $1 million?

A Slovenian woman and her boyfriend have been sentenced to prison for attempted insurance fraud, after she deliberately cut off her hand in hopes of claiming more than 1 million euros ($1.56 million) in insurance payouts last year.

Julija Adlesic, 22, appeared in a Ljubljana courtroom to hear the verdict on Friday. She kept her reattached hand under a blanket throughout the sentencing hearing, which attracted widespread attention in Slovenia.

The judge slapped Adlesic with a two-year prison term for attempted fraud. She also handed Adlesic’s boyfriend a three-year prison sentence for his role in the scheme, and gave the boyfriend’s dad a one-year suspended sentence.

The bizarre case dates back to 2018 when Adlesic took out five separate insurance policies on herself. She then sliced off her left hand at the wrist with a circular saw in early 2019. The boyfriend and his father brought Adlesic to the emergency room without the hand to ensure it would not be reattached, prosecutors said. They claimed she’d cut it off while cutting tree branches.

Police went to her home and recovered the severed hand just in time for it to be sewn back on.

The court found that Adlesic’s boyfriend had looked up artificial hands shortly before the amputation took place. They argued that his search history proved it was a deliberate act, and that he’d talked Adlesic into giving up her left hand for $1 million.

Adlesic had argued throughout the trial that it was an accident, and that she would never have deliberately amputated her hand.

“No one wants to be crippled,” she said during the trial, according to Sky News. “My youth has been destroyed. I lost my hand at the age of 20. Only I know how it happened.”

Written By Josh K. Elliott  Global News

Police have made 17 arrests in total in a gang dedicated to faking car accidents to claim compensation from unsuspecting insurance companies. The intricate scheme involved many facets that ranged from fake ‘damage inspectors’ to fabricated medical certificates.

Police were alerted to the gang when an unnamed insurance company enlisted the help of an accident investigator to look into a potentially fraudulent case. During the investigations a video emerged that broke open the case of a gang of expert fraudsters and led police into a rabbit hole of crash for cash operations. The video showed an unnamed man at the wheel of a car outside a garage in the Cartama area of Malaga, repeatedly driving into another stationary car. It emerged that the man was an expert in recreating exact cosmetic damage on vehicles to match forged incident reports. Upon identifying the man thanks to the branding of the workshop shown in the video, police discovered a network of criminals behind the spike in insurance claims across the city. As details of the schemes were revealed, the intricacy of the operation became clear. The gang would recreate damage on specific vehicle in a deliberate an accurate way, then they would “hire” a damage assessor to review the damage and sign it off in an official document. In the accident report, police noticed that the accidents happened usually during holiday periods, where there was very few cars on the road, but the cars would always contain many passengers to maximize payouts. Members of the gang would also admit themselves into hospital to gain fake medical certificates for injuries supposedly sustained during the accident.
Eventually police performed raids on a number of properties in the Cartama area of Malaga and arrested 17 individuals, all Spanish and ranging between 18 and 58 years old.

By James Warren/The Olive Press/Spain- 24 Mar, 2021

In order to claim a sum insured in the millions, a man had his hand deliberately cut off by a train. How could the court not believe the claimant’s version of the accident?

A 45-year-old man was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for fraud in the Dortmund / Germany district court. The judges considered it as proven that the defendant was trying to collect millions by committing insurance fraud.

Crocodile and nail boards

As the WDR television reports, the claimant was a professional player who had insured his hand with various accident insurance companies for around six million euros. The very same hand was then alleged to have been severed by a train. The defendant alleged that it was an accident and that he wanted to cross the tracks and stumbled into the path of the train. The court did not believe this account of events because for one reason the claimant had a history of taking out an unusually large number of accident insurance policies. In addition, in 2014, the man claimed that a crocodile had bit his hand while on vacation in Australia. However, it turned out that the man had inflicted the injuries on himself using two nail boards.

Whilst this is a particularly bizarre case, it does shows the unbelievable lengths to which a fraudster will go in their attempt to defraud insurance companies.