"I sent the following message to many people throughout the country. We need to get this information to our elected officials so they can create new laws to prevent this type of vicious behavior by insurance companies. What if they did this to your family?
If you know of anyone who is being harassed by an insurance company, please share these tips.
I wanted to warn you of several tricks (known as crimes) that your insurance company will use against you. Some of these things were done to our family and some were done to other families we have talked to. I will add suggestions for protecting your family in parenthesis after some of the items. We had to do several of these things.
I am sending you this information to help you so you will be aware of what they might be doing and to give you ideas on how to deal with their criminal behavior. We had to learn all of this along the way.
-They will tamper with your mail. They would take our mail (especially mail from our attorneys) and then it would show up a couple weeks later. (Get a heavy duty locking mailbox or use a P.O. Box at a local post office. Install surveillance cameras that watch your mailbox. It is a federal offense to tamper with the U.S. mail, so if you can prove it, they will go to jail. We didn't install surveillance cameras, but I wish we had.)
-They might tap your phone or listen to your conversations with special equipment from somewhere near your house. (If you think your phone has been tapped, check with your local phone company. You could also hire a private investigator to look into it.)
-They will try to hack into your computer, so you make sure you have a good antivirus or antispyware program and make sure the firewall feature is turned on.
-They can take photos of you from up to a mile away with long-distance camera lenses. (Don't open your blinds or curtains unless you are fully dressed.)
-They will use illegal surveillance people. In our case, they had people following us who weren't licensed investigators, and that's illegal. One woman who followed and photographed us was the sister-in-law of another attorney. (Get their license plate numbers and vehicle descriptions. Serve subpoenas on them requesting them to appear for depositions. That woman I mentioned only quit harassing us after we served a subpoena on her. Then she lied and said she was just taking photos of traffic and people for fun.) Another idea is to take pictures of the surveillance people. They like to think they are sneaky, so they don't like it when you notice them.
-They will use illegal license plates on the surveillance vehicles. Some of the vehicles that were following us had license plates that didn't belong to those vehicles. (Take pictures of their vehicles and license plates. Tell the police that a strange car is following you and the license plates don't belong to the car. If you mention that you are fighting an insurance company, the police won't do anything even though they are committing a crime by using those illegal license plates.)
-They will use vans or RVs as surveillance vehicles. In our case, they parked an RV near our house and used it as their base of operation. The RV was parked there for several months. When we finally got sick of it, we moved. That was a waste of time---the RV moved with us that same day and parked near our new location. (We should have approached the RV and let them know that we knew what they were doing. We asked the police for help, but again they said "no".)
-They will put you and your attorneys under surveillance. They are trying to find something bad about you or your attorneys to force you to give up. They won't admit they had you under surveillance unless they find something to use against you. In other cases, they found that the policyholder was having a secret affair, and they found that another policyholder was gay. Both of those families gave up under threat of exposure.
-They might damage your property or your car as another form of intimidation to scare you into giving up.
-They will follow and photograph other family members including your children. Our 18-year-old son is still reluctant to drive a car because he was followed and harassed so often. I wish we had hired a bodyguard for him, but we didn't think about that until much later.
-They will pay your neighbors to spy on you or to make up lies about you. This happened in our case.
-They might go into your house and steal things or damage things. (Get a security system, especially if it's monitored by a local security agency. Again, a surveillance system would also be helpful.) In one case, the homeowner found a surveillance person inside their home. The homeowner shot the intruder in the leg.
-Wait for the spy to pass you and then follow their car. Take pictures of them and their vehicle. Write down their vehicle description and license plate number and give the information to your attorneys.
Another suggestion would be to hire your own surveillance people. They could get details about the people who are watching you. They would also be more aggressive about getting them to stop. If a private investigator is following you, you are supposed to be able to approach them and ask for their I.D. We couldn't do that in our case. If we tried to approach them or even looked at them, they would disappear and then new people would show up to watch us. This happened several times.
Hire your own surveillance people to watch the insurance company representatives and the insurance company attorneys. Some policyholders have done this in other cases and have discovered valuable information (such as drug use).
We tried to get help from law enforcement, but they wouldn't help. They just laughed at us and said that insurance companies are "allowed" to put people under surveillance. If you decide to call the police for help, don't mention that you are fighting an insurance company.
I hope this information helps you to be prepared for their tricks/crimes."
Here are 3 related items on this subject:
http://www.disabilityclaimssolutions.com/articles.html
http://abajournal.com/news/video_surveillance_trips_up_insurer/
http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/054927p.pdf
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