Are You Being Filmed Post-Accident?

When you have claimed that you suffered certain injuries in an accident, the insurance company has the right to conduct their own surveillance on you to disprove your case. You have the legal obligation to prove your damages, so the insurance company can do many things to gather its own evidence on you. While you may not always be filmed after an accident, you should act as if you are being watched. If you let your guard down, the insurance company can take something out of context and use it to try to reduce your settlement offer.

Insurance Companies Often Conduct Surveillance on Claimants

The insurance company will sometimes hire someone or use one of their employees to follow you at certain points after the accident. For example, if you claim that you are unable to work or that you have suffered in certain ways, the insurance company will look for anything that is inconsistent with the statements in your claim. They actually have a pretty wide latitude to conduct surveillance on you. The insurance company may check your social media accounts, and they may tail you when you leave the house. The only things that they cannot do are harass you and film inside you your own home. They cannot train a camera at your window to catch things that you do inside your home. Other than that, practically everything else is fair game.

The insurance company is looking for every edge that they can get on you in settlement negotiations. Even if they catch a random and isolated act once, they may try to use it to cast doubt upon your entire claim. If they have the evidence on video, it may be difficult to argue against them. Further, there may even be a risk of being accused of insurance fraud if the evidence is so thoroughly at odds with what is in your case.

Insurance Companies Will Do Practically Anything to Save Money

You should never put anything past the insurance company. Their use of investigators to conduct surveillance is growing, and it may be worth the insurance company’s investment. Filming and following people have saved the insurance company money that often justifies hiring an investigator. Anything that the insurance company films can be admissible in a case, especially since you have the chance to answer and potentially rebut the videotaped evidence.

From your standpoint, you need to be extremely careful once you have filed a claim. You should always err on the side of caution in your public activities. You can and definitely should claim your full damages and not leave any money on the table. However, you should also do everything necessary to protect your own financial interests in your claim by being careful with what you do and say.

You should always contact an attorney after you have suffered an injury in a car accident. An experienced Tustin car accident lawyer can advise you about mistakes that you should not make while your claim is pending.