engine fire

[Big hub]

just lost my truck to fire, started we think by over charged battery, or a fault in the extension cable reel, when i claimed on the insurance i wasn't prepared for what followed, when i spoke to the insurance what followed was a half hour our interview, at one point i jokingly said are you going to read me my rights, and do i need a lawyer. Has any body had this grilling, i had the fealing i was guilty of torching the truck and had to prove i didn't

[TwigtheWonderkid]

Big hub said:

i had the fealing i was guilty of torching the truck and had to prove i didn't

That's a good thing. People do set fire to their own vehicles. I don't want them to get paid, thus putting up the premiums for the rest of us who are honest. If I had a fire or theft claim, I'd fully expect to be put thru the ringer.

It's for them to prove your claim is fraudulent, not for you to prove it isn't. The way they do that is by vigorous questioning of all claimants.

[jamieduff1981]

Big hub said:

Has any body had this grilling, i had the fealing i was guilty of torching the truck and had to prove i didn't

We had a house fire in 2019. Not a great thing to have happen to be honest. The insurers made it so much worse though. It started off with a Claims Adjuster being appointed who'd have been out of their depth in a carpark puddle who promised a lot in terms of interim payments for clothes and stuff but that didn't happen and they were changed out for someone more experienced.

Then the forensics person visited. Crawled about in the loft and poked about here and there before asking us some questions. It felt like an interview under caution. My wife gave a very narrow time window when the 999 call was made, which this person latched on to and started grilling us quite aggressively actually. Our answer was that we had CCTV in another part of the house and we'd reviewed the footage to see if we could see any smoke on the camera pointing towards the part of the house (it's a weird layout) where the fire happened, and we therefore knew the time stamp when she cut power at the main fuse box whilst on the phone. At that point he seemed to relax and revealed he'd already found the source and it was a light fitting in our en suite - just like we'd said.

It got worse generally from there. The insurer applied proportionate remedy, or averaging, which was not a clause actually in our policy. The whole process dragged on over 2 years before we defeated them with help from the FOS and finally got our money. The claims handler at the insurer was absolutely sodding useless and didn't know their arse from their elbow. It caused a massive amount of stress for us. You're not people to an insurance company though, nor customers. Just a revenue stream.