Can Gov. Hochul stop staged car crashes in New York?

www.Gothamist.com, Walter Wuthmann, March 2, 2026

When Ian Davey of Davenport, Florida, filed an insurance claim for a 2023 car crash with a day care bus in Queens, he filled in a section asking whether the incident was staged with a definitive answer: “Hells F–ing NO.”

But there were some red flags.

The doctor who declared Davey “totally disabled” by his injuries was a urologist practicing at a hospital in Bangladesh, according to court documents. Records show the only witness to the collision owned a personal injury consulting firm and later retracted his statement to investigators. And the surgeon who operated on Davey was named in a civil racketeering case as part of an alleged criminal network that staged crashes and exaggerated injuries to inflate insurance claims.

“This case is a fraud from top to bottom, an entirely manufactured claim,” said attorney Dan Johnston, who’s representing the bus driver. “The most horrifying part is that this is a set of circumstances that repeat over and over again every single day in the courts of New York.”

Legal experts say the state is seeing an “epidemic” of staged car crashes. The New York Department of Financial Services’ Insurance Frauds Bureau reported nearly 44,000 incidents of suspected auto insurance fraud in the state last year — an 80% increase since 2020.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and a coalition of business groups are now pushing for changes to the state’s auto insurance laws they argue will crack down on staged car crashes and reduce ratepayer premiums across the board. But some of those closest to the issue say the phenomenon won’t be stamped out so easily. Companies in the red. Continue article