Triple J drive hosts Lewis Hobba and Michael Hing slammed for laughing at insurance fraud

Drive show hosts Lewis Hobba and Michael Hing were laughing throughout the calls from listeners, but not everyone is happy.

Callers into Triple J’s drive show, Hobba & Hing, have detailed how they have committed insurance fraud, causing widespread concern in the industry.

Hosts Lewis Hobba and Michael Hing ran a segment throughout much of last Thursday’s program about the lengths people had gone to get out of things.

One caller, called Darren, spoke about how he left his tools on site over the weekend and they were stolen and then smashed in his car window so he could claim them on insurance.

The hosts stressed it was insurance fraud but were laughing throughout the phone call.

Another listener identified as Todd called in to outline how he helped a friend with a fraudulent worker’s compensation claim.

His friend was a “bit jack of work” and faked an injury to “hopefully get workers comp”, Todd said, and needed his help to make the scam work.

“He came home and said: ‘I need you to be a physio.’ I said ‘What do you mean?’. (He said): ‘I just need you to have a fake physio studio that I can go to, to fix my fake injury’,” he explained on the show.

“So we spent quite a few hours making the logo and we made a fake physio studio and we sent the insurance company bills for physio work to fix his fake injury and they paid us and so eventually we had to stop as we didn’t know how much physio was actually required to fix the fake injury that he had faked at work.”

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Triple J drive co-hosts Lewis Hobba and Michael Hing have drawn the ire of the insurance industry. Picture: News Regional Media

Todd said the scam happened in 1997 before the Google era so it was easy to come up with a fake address for the physio “in an industrial estate”.

The callers remarks were met with raucous laughter from the hosts, who asked Todd if he later became a physio. He said it “seemed really difficult” but “it did pay well”.

But an Insurance Council Australia (ICA) spokesperson told news.com.au that committing insurance fraud is not a joking matter and has cost the industry millions.

“Many Australians need the support and protection of their insurer, particularly after natural disasters,” the spokesperson said. “These people can be impacted when insurer resources are diverted from assisting legitimate claims to dealing with fraudulent claims.”

In 2017 insurers detected $280 million in fraudulent claims in all insurance classes, excluding those relating to personal injury, the ICA spokesperson added.

“This figure represents the amount of detected insurance fraud only. Research by KPMG in 2012 estimates that the insurance industry may only be detecting one-third of the insurance fraud being perpetrated,” the said.

“Many prior studies, including those by KPMG and the Australian Institute of Criminology show that the occurrence of insurance fraud is significantly undetected and under reported. The cost of insurance fraud is incorporated into insurance premiums, it is paid for by all policyholders.”

News.com.au contacted the ABCfor comment.