By Kim Jong-chan
With the number of insurance frauds increasing in the country, most insurance companies have created special investigation units (SIUs), consisting of 20 to 30 employees.
They take over suspicious cases, conduct investigations on their own and hand the results over to police. SIU members include former police officers and nurses.
The move came after a fraud case stunned the country’s insurance industry early this year, in which a 44-year-old shaman and her younger sister were charged with murder and insurance fraud.
In December last year, the shaman, surnamed Ahn, filed with a large insurance company applications for insurance money amounting to 3.4 billion won for the “sudden death” of her younger sister.
Company officials said they were skeptical about her death, after reviewing documents submitted by Ahn, including a death certificate.
The document said Ahn’s younger sister died of cerebral hemorrhage at her home. But the officials found few signs of the woman suffering from illnesses, such as hypertension, while she was alive. They also discovered that Ahn took out a huge sum in life insurance some months before the death.
After concluding that something was wrong, the officials handed the case over to police for investigations.
Later, the police said, they found the younger sister alive when they raided an apartment in the southwestern city of Gwangju.
According to the police, the suspects murdered a homeless woman on Dec. 30 last year. The next day, they received a death certificate for the woman, and had the body cremated.
Seo In-cheon, a senior official of the insurance company’s SIU, said bereaved family members hurriedly cremated the body without holding any funeral ceremony.
Seo worked as a police officer for 17 years. Currently, large insurance companies have SIUs tasked with investigating suspicious applications for insurance money. Normally, the SIUs investigate 5 to 10 percent of applications submitted, industry sources said.