A man who fraudulently claimed to have crashed his rental car while vacationing in the States was handed a two-year suspended sentence and forced to pay more than £60,000 in compensation.
Jack Higgins, 38, from Bradford, told his insurers that he rented a Range Rover while on holiday in California from a firm called All Star Car Rental.
He alleged that he crashed the vehicle into a wall after swerving to avoid an animal on Interstate 110.
However, investigators discovered that not only was he still in the UK at the time of the supposed crash, but the hire company was a complete fabrication and did not exist.
Higgins took out an insurance policy in January 2019, which provided worldwide cover when driving hire cars, City of London Police reported.
He made a claim on his insurance the next month, claiming he had paid All Star Car Rental £59,987 to cover the cost of repairs to the Range Rover.
The fraudster even provided the insurance company with fake documentation from All Star Car Rental and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), a completed SR-1 form used to report road traffic collisions in California, photos of the damaged Range Rover and bank statements.
The insurance company received 10 phone calls from Higgins to chase the payment. The claim was settled in March and Higgins received a total of £59,987.
A photo of the Range Rover that Bradford-based Jack Higgins, 38, claimed was a hire car he had crashed while on holiday in California, but was actually a shot taken from a vehicle auction website
However, in August an acquaintance of Higgins tipped-off the insurance company that he had been in the UK at the time of the reported collision.
An investigation by the insurance company found that there was no record of Higgins having entered the US around the time of the crash and that All Star Car Rental did not exist.
Higgins’ insurers referred the case to the City of London Police’s Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) for further investigation.
They found that the photos of the damaged Range Rover had been taken from a vehicle auction website.
Additionally, the documents Higgins provided to his insurer from the LAPD were also found to have been forged.
Investigators also discovered that the bank statements he provided the insurance company had been forged.
Higgins was arrested by IFED officers in July 2020 but during his police interview insisted that he had been set up by the person who contacted the insurance company to report the fraudulent claim.
Officers commissioned a voice analysis to compare Higgins’ voice against recordings of the ten phone calls made to the insurance company before the claim was paid out.
Higgins alleged that he crashed the vehicle into a wall after swerving to avoid an animal on the road
The analysis concluded that there was strong evidence to show that Higgins made the calls.
During a second interview with IFED officers in 2022, Higgins stated that the phone calls could have been made using deepfake technology.
When officers told Higgins that the level of deepfake technology needed to make a real-time phone call did not exist in 2019, he stated that the person who set him up could have invented it or taken it from the dark web.
A second voice analysis was commissioned and found no evidence to support Higgins’ allegations around deepfake technology.
A review of a laptop seized from Higgins showed that it had been used to produce the documents submitted to the insurance company.
The insurance cheat pleaded guilty at Leeds Crown Court on 4 March 2025 to fraud by false representation. He was sentenced at the same court on 4 April 2025 to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years.
Higgins has paid back the £59,987 received from the insurance company and was also ordered to pay £6,000 to IFED to cover the cost of a voice analysis carried out as part of the investigation, and to complete 300 hours of unpaid work.
Detective Constable Stuart Osbourne, from IFED, said: ‘Higgins thought he could take his insurer for a ride and defraud it out of a significant sum of money.
Higgins claimed that the nonexistent crash took place on Interstate 110 (pictured) in California while he was on holiday in the States
‘Fraudulent claims like this push up the cost of insurance premiums for honest policyholders.
‘The major pitfall for Higgins was the indisputable evidence against him. We conducted an extensive investigation to show that, not only had he been in the UK when the collision allegedly occurred, he forged the documents he sent to his insurer.
‘Higgins has now been left with a criminal record and must pay an additional £6,000 worth of costs.
‘IFED and the insurance industry will work together to make sure that submitting bogus claims for road traffic collisions doesn’t pay, wherever in the world the collision is said to have taken place.’
