Not all emergency commissioners are equally useful

The Public Chamber (OP) will look for a solution to the problem of “emergency” scammers. They arrive at the scene of an accident, present themselves as “accident commissioners” and trick the victims into transferring the right to receive money from the insurance company to them, leaving drivers without compensation and repairs as a result. The problem has not existed for the first year, but recently the number of such cases has become more frequent, experts of the OP and insurers say. The Ministry of Justice and the Central Bank are ready to join the search for solutions, but they do not yet have a specific recipe.

Yesterday, the OP discussed a common car fraud scheme faced by drivers in large cities. Maria Aksenova, a motorist from St. Petersburg, told how she had an accident a year ago and called the traffic police. The emergency commissioner who arrived at the scene took a long time to draw up documents, photographed the accident site, and then offered to sign the necessary papers. Subsequently, it turned out that it was an assignment agreement, which transferred to a certain company the right of a motorist to collect compensation for OSAGO. So the scammers received money from the insurance company for Maria Aksenova, who found out about this after the fact, left without funds and with a broken car. A similar incident happened to the driver Timofey Chistov: “accident commissioners” drove up in a car with white-moon special signals and persuaded him to sign an agreement on the transfer of the right to send a notice of an accident to the insurance company. In fact, it was also an assignment agreement, according to which the “commissioner” received money. As it turned out, the drivers either did not really read what they were signing, or the signature was put on the form, which was then made the last page of the cession agreement.

Accurate statistics of such cases do not exist, but there are “hundreds of thousands of them,” Alexei Artamonov, vice-president of Alfastrakhovanie, said yesterday. “There is a whole army of people who somehow receive information about accidents and quickly send people there,” he said. “In some regions, scammers agree in advance with taxi drivers so that they call a certain “control room” and report what happened on the roads” . Mr. Artamonov admitted that it is not very clear to insurers how to deal with this, except by increasing the legal literacy of drivers. However, it is possible to make an amendment to the law on OSAGO on the mandatory notarization of cession agreements for “auto-citizenship”, he believes.

The head of the Federation of Car Owners of Russia, Maxim Yedryshev, said that swindlers have recently “intensified”: many cases have been recorded in Moscow, Volgograd, and in the southern regions. The police, according to him, are reluctant to work with such cases, since formally the contract was signed voluntarily and there are no direct violations of the law. He supported the idea of ​​notarization of the cession agreement.

Yevgenia Lazareva, project manager of the ONF “For the Rights of Borrowers”, proposed developing a technology that allows citizens to track how someone on their behalf is trying to receive a payment from an insurance company, for example, through the portal of public services. And the general director of the Siberian Association of Emergency Commissioners Oksana Kostitskaya proposed to legally define the term “emergency commissioner” and the corresponding rights and obligations.

Recall that this term does not legally exist. And although the concept itself is familiar to many drivers, now there are several types of emergency commissioners on the roads with completely different functionality. Firstly, the Avtodor state company has a service called “Accident Commissioners”: these are special employees who help to quickly remove damaged vehicles from the road or fix minor breakdowns (a free service for users of toll roads). The second type of commissioners are representatives of insurers who, upon a call from a client, go to the scene of an accident to assist in the preparation of documents (as a rule, in case of insured events under hull insurance). The third is the commercial services that exist in a number of cities, which leave on the call of the driver, helping to file an accident without the traffic police through the European protocol.

Vladimir Murashin, deputy head of the department of the Ministry of Justice, agreed that “this topic should be somehow highlighted in the legislation, regulatory standards should be introduced on the status of emergency commissioners,” as well as “educational work” with the population. It is not the first time that a solution to the problem has been sought, said Olga Shelepneva, head of the Central Bank’s insurance market regulation department. Cases when a victim in an accident is fraudulently imposed on an assignment agreement (including the replacement of sheets) are fraudulent, she believes: perhaps it is worth thinking about criminal liability here. Ms. Shelepneva said that the Central Bank at one time proposed creating a certain register of emergency commissioners, but the government did not support this idea.

Experts interviewed by Kommersant offer other ways to solve the problem. To exclude fraud, only the insured should receive the payment under OSAGO, says Sergey Efremov, vice president of the All-Russian Union of Insurers. The lawyer of the “Freedom of Choice” movement, Serhiy Radko, proposes to enshrine in the law the right of the victim to unilaterally refuse the assignment agreement if he has not received anything under it. “This is exactly what usually happens – in return for the ceded right, they promise to repair the car. Which then, of course, no one does, ”he explained to Kommersant. The second option is to limit the possibility of receiving compensation under the cession agreement. For example, only with confirmation of the consent of the victim, expressed directly to the insurer. “And we also need to figure out where these people quickly get information about the accident and why they arrive faster than the police,” Mr. Radko added.

Ivan Buranov