Los Banos Rotary Club History
Insurance Chislers Are Gifted Actors Speaker Declares

"Some of our greatest actors are never seen on the stage or screen," stressed Rex Roby, special insurance agent, in an address before the Los Banos Lions and Rotary Clubs.

Roby, an agent for the Association of Casualty and Surety Companies and the National Board of Fire Underwriters, made this statement to emphasis the incredible lengths to which a special type of insurance chisler goes in making fraudulent claims.

"They're real artists," Roby said, and among the more common tricks they perpetrate are slipping mice in soft drinks and swallowing laundry soap to simulate convulsions.

Others have even smashed their toes with a sledge hammer to collect a claim, while among the more common frauds, he related, is the one where a chisler scrapes himself with a cheese grater and then jumps in front of a slow moving car. "Of course," Roby emphasized, "he is careful not to really injure himself."

Roby's talk was entitles "The Missing One Per Cent," and he explained this is the portion of the insurance premium dollar which finances the payment of claims.

These persons, he pointed out, always attempt to get a quick-on-the-spot settlement and seldom carry their case into courts. 'In the middle 1930s the situation became so bad the Bureau of Claims was established, staffed mostly with former FBI agents."

He said during an average year some one million bogus claims are investigated and in most cases prosecuted. The index card system is the bureau's most valuable weapon, he stated, in uncovering fraudulent claims.
The history of each claim is thus recorded and should a person file for damages under similar conditions more than three times he immediately comes under the suspicion of the Bureau of Claims. Some ten million cards have been filed in the last decade and an estimated one million claimants are checked through the system each year.

May 24, 1955

---