By SUE REID FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Louise was driving her three young children home from lunch when something happened that gives her sleepless nights to this day.
She is a careful driver who sticks to Sadiq Khan’s 20mph London speed limit – and things were no different that Saturday afternoon.
‘I had my baby in the car, so I was extra cautious,’ says Louise, a teacher. ‘At a mini-roundabout, a moped accelerated into my path so I stopped. The next thing, this man was sprawled on the bonnet and his bike on the ground. I remember it had an L-plate on it.’
A second or two later, the driver slid off her blue Volvo. Clearly unhurt, he propped up his bike, then came back to the car asking for her name, mobile number and insurance company details.
Throughout all of this bewildering saga, he did not once remove his helmet so his face remained hidden. ‘I went round to my Volvo’s right-hand side where he had come at my car,’ remembered Louise last week, adding that she could not see any damage. ‘I started to speak to him but he cut me off saying: “No English.”
‘But he was asking for my personal data, as though from a script, in the very language he claimed not to know. And he kept on and on at me, pestering me for it.’
Eventually, Louise gave him her phone number – but no other details – and he disappeared on his bike. She took the children back home.
Her husband was away working abroad that weekend, and she mused to herself that because no one was hurt, and neither vehicle had been damaged, it was the end of the matter.
An illegally driven moped slammed into Louise’s Volvo – and the driver walked away unscathed. Just 48 hours later, he began bombarding her with threatening messages
But when she talked to friends and to her husband about it, they warned her it was probably an attempted insurance scam. They had heard of similar stories in the area and read about them on social media.
She took the precaution of telling the police, adding that the moped was being driven illegally, against the flow of traffic, and she was leaving the roundabout when it came into her path.
Sure enough, ever since that afternoon in late August, the driver has plagued her with WhatsApp messages – in which he calls himself Weder – implying that Louise was to blame for the ‘accident’.
The first text, within 48 hours of the crash, said: ‘Hi, good afternoon, I’m going to apply for insurance, as we agreed, OK?’
Louise responded she had made no such agreement and that she had reported him to the Met Police for ‘attacking my vehicle’ with her children inside it.
She wrote back angrily: ‘You drove away entirely unscathed, with no damage to your moped. It is entirely consistent with other similar “accidents” in my area.’
Weder replied defensively in broken English: ‘Hi actually you who hit me I was already inside the roundabout the preference is mine . . . my vehicle was unable to ride you were more than 20mph.’
The threatening messages continued. One from Weder said that Louise had told him to ‘trigger’ an insurance claim, which she denies doing, although she certainly remembers he was aggressive during the confrontation at the mini-roundabout.
Louise's experience bore the hallmarks of the ‘cash for crash’ insurance swindle that’s now being perpetrated on an industrial scale in London and other UK cities
‘I think this man was hoping that I would give him money on the street. I guess some innocent people do that because they don’t want to lose their no-claims bonus,’ she says now.
Weder’s pestering on social media did not stop. Louise has discovered that after the ‘accident’, he approached a firm called Motorcycle Accident Management Services (McAMS) to manage his insurance claim against her on a no-win, no-fee basis.
The first email to her from McAMS, a few days later, said: ‘Good morning, Mrs Louise [sic]. We are contacting you because we believe that you have been involved in a road traffic accident with our client Mr Weder on 23/08/2025 and we’d like to hear your version of events’.
On the advice of lawyer friends, she did not reply. But it didn’t end there. She contacted her own insurance company – a household name – to warn them that a fraudulent claim might be made on her insurance. Which is what happened.
Last week they emailed her with a series of questions such as: ‘When did you first see the moped driver? Did you enter the roundabout first?’
The rest of their message was muddled and appeared to be preparing to make a payout to close the case which could, of course, invalidate her own no-claims bonus. The email from her insurance company said the moped driver claimed, correctly, that Weder had approached Louise’s Volvo from the right.
But it then added: ‘It will prove very difficult to dispute liability as you should give way to parties joining the roundabout when they come from that direction.’
This didn’t make sense to Louise. To recap, the bike did come from the right – but driving the wrong way round the mini-roundabout as Louise’s car was about to exit. Its driver then staged an accident and claimed she had hit him.
The more the situation developed, the more it bore the hallmarks of the ‘cash for crash’ insurance swindle that’s now being perpetrated on an industrial scale in London and other UK cities, predominantly by moped delivery drivers.
This ruthless scam involves deliberately driving into expensive, obviously well-insured, cars often on quiet roads where there are few witnesses – and then making a bogus claim.
Often, lone older women or mums on the school run are targeted, say police.
Time and again, a roundabout is chosen for the ‘accident’ as its multiple entrances mean the moped can appear to come out of nowhere.
Insurance firm Allianz say the scams rocketed by 60-fold last year alone, costing the industry hundreds of millions of pounds annually in paperwork, which, in turn, push up premiums for all UK drivers.
According to the Insurance Fraud Bureau, which has a ‘cheatline’ collecting reports on the crime, there are now an estimated 30,000 incidents per year, which amounts to an annual cost to insurers of up to £350 million.
Social media sites, particularly X and Mumsnet, are full of worrying real-life examples of the scams. One woman from south London said: ‘A motorcyclist drove right up to my car while it was stationary, no jolt, and then put his bike down and got off it. I felt he had staged a collision. When I Googled his name that he gave me, only one name came up, linked to a porn site.’
Another writer, on Mumsnet, said: ‘This has happened 12 times in three days in my area of Surrey. It is the same man, or a group of men, doing it.’
A third person, a man on the neighbourhood community site near Louise’s north London home, commented recently: ‘It happens to anyone. Shout at them, say you know it’s a scam. When one driver ran into my wife and claimed to be a victim, I turned up. Panicking, he hopped on his scooter and went off the wrong way down the road.’
Louise’s ‘accident’ ticked all the boxes for these scams. Invariably, some victims cave in and let their insurers pay the claim to get the matter over with. The consequence is they pay face a higher insurance premium even though they have done nothing wrong.
The prize for the moped driver is an insurance payout, a proportion of which goes to the motorcycle insurance service or legal firm he has used to fast-forward his compensation claim for damages. Sometimes, injury claims – faked, of course – are made too.
There is no suggestion that McAMS or other accident management services encourage the shady claims.
The McAMS website says that it provides a ‘no win-no fee’ service for moped drivers’ in accidents ‘meaning you only pay legal fees if your claim is successful, and a pre-agreed percentage will be taken from your compensation’. It adds details of an email hotline to make a claim.
The company said it relies on a network of introducer garages for marketing and recommendation of services and pays commission for successful claims.
Marek Coghill, a detective inspector at City of London Police Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department, is targeting crash-for-cash swindles in the capital, where most of them happen.
He says the moped drivers involved, whom he calls ‘scammers’, are often from the Brazilian immigrant community who speak Portuguese as a first language and become delivery drivers on arrival in this country.
He told the trade magazine Insurance Times: ‘We were often not able to find them because they kept their helmets on [at the crash]. Because of the transient nature of the people committing the offences, they were often gone from the country by the time we got our ducks in a row [for arrests].’
He said that his force has changed tactics, targeting the criminal gangs behind the scams which are linked to rogue garages hiring out cheap-rate mopeds to foreign delivery drivers new to the UK who need money fast.
‘The garages can set a proviso that the moped driver must stage a certain number of accidents as part of the hire deal,’ he added. He estimates that the money reaped by the scamming gangs runs into millions annually in London alone.
After being given Weder’s number by Louise, the Daily Mail decided to ask him questions. We spoke to him, posing as Louise’s friend and asked for extra details of what had happened to her at 4.45pm on August 23 in a north London suburb.
We said Louise was worried about a claim being made because of her insurance premium going up as a result. He said ‘No English’ before hanging up.
We then messaged him saying the same thing, offering to meet him privately to discuss the matter ‘anywhere in London’. He never answered.
Liverpool-based McAMS is run by barrister Alan Sellers, an expert in personal injury and credit-hire cases, who is executive chairman of its parent company, Anexo. His wife, also a personal injury specialist – as well as part-time competitive showjumper and one of North-West England’s richest women – is Samantha Moss. She is an Anexo director and runs McAMS’s sister legal firm, Bond Turner, which deals with many disputed crash insurance claims made through McAMS.
McAMS’s legitimate success in dominating the moped accident management market means many suspected cash-for-crash fraudsters inevitably try to make claims via it.
A database set up by victims of the fraud in south-west London found that, of the 79 incidents where people shared details of the claims management company involved, 72 were being processed by McAMS or other linked companies within the Anexo Group.
In March this year, my colleague Tom Kelly investigated the crash scams and contacted McAMS due to its dominance in the moped claims market.
Ms Moss, at the time, said it had ‘every interest’ in avoiding ‘fraudulent claims as they were hugely damaging for the company’ and said it was investigating the Daily Mail’s allegations that garages allowed fraudulent claims. She said the company would immediately cease to deal with any garage found to be involved in fraudulent claims and had already terminated dealings with some after being contacted by the Daily Mail.
McAMS rejects more than 50 per cent of claim requests it receives and ID-checks all clients, including electronically, she added.
There is no doubt that Anexo offers a very efficient one-stop shop for motorcyclists who are involved in no-fault accidents but do not have funds to launch compensation claims themselves.
But that is no comfort to Louise who is facing weeks of worry, wrangling over the out-of-the-blue ‘crash’ with a foreign stranger whose face she has never seen.
‘I can’t even prove he is using his correct name or where he lives. Yet he knows a lot about me’, she says of her frightening experience – one that could happen to any innocent driver.