MOSCOW — New Yorkers may have been shocked on Tuesday by news of a $48 million insurance scam that involved thousands of fake car crashes. But in Russia, where laws are regularly bent, overlooked or simply ignored, fraud is a rule of the road.
Take it from Vyacheslav Luzhnikh, a Russian driving instructor. Luzhnikh runs Incom-Drive, a Moscow driving school. He teaches a six-day course on how to behave if you become the target of a fake car crash, called in Russian a podstava.
"Criminal groups specialize in it," Luzhnikh said. "It's usually two cars. They force you into an accident. Then they say you are guilty. They demand money."
Russian roads may even have been the birthplace of the New York fraud scheme. At least some of the profits in the case, which led to 567 indictments and featured a huge network of drivers, doctors and phony clinics, were channeled to businesses in Russia, according to authorities in New York.
The Soviet system, with its frequent privations and shortages, encouraged scheming as an essential survival skill, and the effects of that time have endured. Pilfering from the state was not seen as a crime, largely because the state's resources were seen as endless and vacuumed from the population unfairly.
"Russian people are very wily," Luzhnikh said. "If they can't earn money honestly, they earn it in any way they can. It's normal."
In the New York scam, the target was an insurance company. But in Russia, where automobile insurance has yet to become widely used, schemers pressure unsuspecting victims to pay cash on the spot. Insurance companies are rarely involved.
"The criminals who do this, they are good judges of character," said Alexei Matveyev, who writes a weekly column called Liquidation of Automobile Ignorance. "They pressure you psychologically. They try to push you to decide everything immediately on the spot."
There are about 10 different ways the scam is carried out, but the basic plot goes like this: One car drives up behind you signaling for you to change lanes. You pull to the right and another car speeds into that lane, out of nowhere, causing you to hit it.
The plotters also bribe neighborhood police to arrive on the scene and further intimidate the victim, Luzhnikh said. A police colonel took his class recently, and said men in his patrol unit had moonlighted in car crash scams. It was unclear whether the colonel was in the class to stop crime or to start a business of his own.
The schemes can be elaborate. In one instance, the plotters were a male driver and a woman sitting in the back seat. After the accident, the driver said the woman was the wife of a KGB colonel and was about to give birth, a story that guaranteed speedy settlement.
Victims sometimes take action themselves. Last year, a group of traffic reporters for a local radio station drove to the scene of a scam where a colleague had been targeted. The reporters, wise to the ways of the scam, chased away the perpetrators.
Schemers rarely prey on drivers with cars that look more valuable than $30,000, Luzhnikh said. That is because owners of very expensive cars often have powerful friends and bodyguards who are not averse to solving their boss' problems with their fists.
The traffic police say they are trying to fight the scam, but that the law does not recognize it as a crime. A spokesman for the traffic police's crime department said the police have established a working group to decide how to prosecute such cases, so far with little luck.
Russian road crash schemes are about to change. On July 1, a law obliging all Russian drivers to have automobile insurance took effect. Matveyev expects that to open up a whole new host of schemes involving the insurance companies.
"Just give it a year," he said. "There will be dozens of new ones."