Hobba & Hing criticised for segment laughing at insurance fraud

Triple j Drive hosts Lewis Hobba and Michael Hing have been criticised for airing a segment that featured callers sharing how they committed insurance fraud.

On last Thursday’s program, the hosts asked callers to detail the lengths people had gone to get out of things. As news.com.au details, a caller named Todd explained how he helped a friend with faking a worker’s compensation claim in 1997.

“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’,” Todd said 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.”

Another caller, Darren, talked about how his tools were stolen after leaving them on-site over the weekend. He then smashed in his car window so he could claim them on insurance. The hosts were laughing throughout the call, stressing that was insurance fraud.

Speaking to news.com.au, a spokesperson for the Insurance Council of Australia said fraud was no laughing matter, citing a figure of $280 million in fraudulent claims in 2017.

“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.”