- Police arrested four people charged with insurance fraud.
- They allege that the suspects used a bear costume to commit said fraud.
- Their evidence is, in part, video sent to the insurance companies by the suspects themselves.
It might not be bear hunting season in California right now, but authorities just nabbed a big one. In fact, they caught four people involved in a bear costume scheme. These folks thought that they could commit insurance fraud by claiming a bear damaged their cars. In fact, they provided video evidence of the ‘bear’ doing its dirty work. This is probably the dumbest crime you hear about today.
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According to the California Department of Insurance (CDI), police arrested four people for alleged insurance fraud in what it calls Operation Bear Claw. The case kicked off when the suspects claimed that on January 28, 2024, that a bear got into their Rolls Royce Ghost and damaged it. To supplement the claim, they sent the insurance company a video of the alleged attack.
In it, we see a very fuzzy image of what could, in theory, be a bear. It didn’t trick insurance investigators though. “Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” the CDI said. What’s wilder though is that the damage is almost comically unrealistic. The scratch marks are hilariously uniform and in one instance, there are six “claw” marks on one seat. Bears, like people, have five digits, not six.
Detectives also found that this same group made two other insurance claims for the same day alleging even more bear-attack damage. This time, though, the vehicles in question were a 2022 Mercedes E350 and a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG. Here’s where this story gets even wilder though.
The guys repositioned the cars in the driveway between bear attacks. So at 9:44 p.m., according to their own camera, the Rolls Royce is in the driveway getting mauled, and then at 9:57, the AMG is sitting there at the mercy of the ‘bear.’ At some point, they put the E350 into the same spot too but the video cuts off the timestamp in that case.
Finally, when authorities searched the home of the suspects, they found the bear costume complete with claw tools. Now, Ruben Tamrazian, 26, of Glendale; Ararat Chirkinian, 39, of Glendale; Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, of Glendale; and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, of Valley Village are all facing charges of conspiracy and insurance fraud. The different insurance companies were defrauded to the tune of $141,839.
