One day, you’re sitting around your office as in-house counsel at an insurance company and someone calls to ask whether they should pay a claim involving a bear breaking into a luxury vehicle or if, maybe, it’s just a guy dressed in a bear suit committing insurance fraud.
On that day, you should consider what life choices brought you to that point. Because lawyering can be unpleasant but dealing with this case must have been unbearable!
Kevin Underhill’s Lowering the Bar has details on a California Department of Insurance investigation dubbed “Operation Bear Claw” designed to get to the bottom of a series of insurance claims involving a bear roaming a well-to-do area of Los Angeles and ripping up the inside of a Rolls Royce and a pair of Mercedes to the tune of $141,839. The insurance companies involved apparently dragged the government into the inquiry as they stared at surveillance footage and wondered… maybe that’s not a real bear?
Bear with me for a second here. The insurance claims involved three separate ursine attacks upon three different cars at the same location, all made upon different insurance companies. That seems… curious.
The government thought so too and ran the footage by a biologist who was pretty sure this was a human in a bear suit. That proved enough to get a search warrant. Which, as investigative techniques go, is more straightforward than setting up a Honey Pot. Returning to Lowering the Bar’s coverage:
That (plus the biologist) was enough to get a search warrant, and if you assumed these suspects would have disposed of the bear costume after using it to commit three crimes rather than keeping it at home, you must be new here:
Four people have been arrested. I guess, in light of this costume, they lacked any pawsible deniability.
Insurer Thinks Bear Shown in Video Trashing Car Looks a Lot Like a Guy in a Bear Suit [Lowering the Bar]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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