Insurance Rip Off

I always thought the insurance companies existed to protect the customers interests. Here’s a case where they put their interests above the customers and ripped us off.

Insurance Rip Off

 

It was the summer of 1993, and my daughter, Tamara, had just graduated from high school. She had a 1985 Jeep Wrangler that we had just gotten out of Oakley Buick’s Garage that day. They had overhauled the carburetor of the jeep to solve an operational problem. We were entertaining two young lady exchange students that day and Tamara took them to Brahms to get some ice cream in her Jeep. While at the window ordering the Jeep caught on fire. The fire was under the hood and burned all the electrical and a lot of paint off the jeep. Farmers Insurance sent an agent to investigate the incident. The agent wrote us a letter stating the fire originated at the carburetor and that he concluded the carburetor was not put back together properly when it was overhauled. We had the Jeep repaired and paid for it ourselves and provided a copy of the bill to Farmers. They said our claim was being processed. We kept checking back and they finally sent us a check about 6 months later and we thought every thing was fine. A while later, we received our insurance bill and our insurance had gone up about 30%. We went down to Farmers to see why. They told us our daughter had been charged with an accident for the Jeep fire. We pulled out the letter from their inspector and started asking some hard questions and finally got some answers. It seems that Oakley Buick had just switched their insurance to Farmers the day before the fire occurred and the powers that be would not allow the local office to file the claim against Oakley. That was the reason for the six month delay in action. They were afraid they would loose Oakleys business. They had finally decided to clear the loss to Tamara rather than Oakley without telling us anything. They refused to clear the accident off Tamara’s record, so I told them to stick their insurance where the sun don’t shine and changed to Allstate that day. I considered filing a suit against them, but I had one daughter in college and another starting that year and I didn’t have the financial resources to pursue it. Come on insurance companies, you can’t treat your customers this way and expect to get away with it. I tell this story to every one I know in the market for insurance.

Tamara standing next to her Jeep that was damaged by the fire.

Thanks for reading Insurance Ripoff,

Hawg Jaw Bill