On Saturday I was sitting in my car in a supermarket car-park, waiting for the trolley man to get his trolleys under control so I could park. A man in an SUV, well a Toyota Rav4 which is a baby SUV, reversed out of his space without looking and made a great big dent in my car. He was very apologetic and although I was rather annoyed I didn’t shout at him. I just asked him to write down his details so that I could pass them on to my insurance company. He wrote down his name, his address and his car’s registration number. I did the same for him. He thanked me for being so understanding and drove off.
On Monday I phoned my insurance company, told them what had happened and gave them his details. They rang back and said that the registration number I’d given them (194 EGK) wasn’t valid. I realised that I hadn’t actually looked at his SUV to check that he was telling the truth. They said that since they couldn’t trace him I’d have to pay the £100 excess on the claim and that my no-claims bonus would be lost, making my insurance much more expensive for the next few years. I started to feel very depressed; it seemed that I’d been conned out of several hundred pounds.
On Tuesday I had a look at some databases and found out that the address he had given me didn’t seem to exist. Flat 7, 57 Orlando Road, London SW4 OLH. The funny thing is that Orlando Road does exist but it has no number 57, the postcode was nearly right as well. So it seemed that he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie completely. He’d tried to be just inaccurate enough to avoid being tracked down. So I figured maybe he’d given me the right name, despite himself and as it was a very unusual name it might still be possible to find him. I googled around a bit and found a page which belongs to someone who looks very like him.
So I did some more detailed searches of the electoral register and eventually came up with a different address very near to the supermarket where the crash happened. There was a phone number listed for another person living at that address so I phoned it and asked to speak to him. Bingo! He claimed that he had given me the correct registration number but when I insisted that it was incorrect he suddenly ‘remembered’ that he had missed a letter from the beginning.
So now the insurance company have all the correct details and that should be the end of it. But I still feel a bit aggrieved at this man who tried to con me. The insurance company say that it is a criminal offence to deliberately give false details, and since it was he who wrote down all his details he can hardly claim that it was me that got them wrong. But then if he is the person who’s web-page I found he works as a project manager on some very cool regeneration projects. Do I really want to get him involved in a process that could have all sorts of terrible consequences for him? Revenge, justice or mercy - big themes for Christmas.
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