Author: completebodyneeds

A California driver was sentenced for filing a fraudulent insurance claim after dashcam footage showed him involved in a road rage incident that caused the accident. Kenneth Pham Tran, 54, of San Jose, was sentenced after dashcam footage showed him initiating a road rage incident, which resulted in him being rear-ended by a semi-truck. Tran attempted to profit from the accident that he caused by filing an insurance claim to collect an undeserved payout, according to the California Department of Insurance. An investigation into the incident was launched after a referral from San Jose CHP, which first investigated the collision…

A few years before the more-recent spate of Florida insurance carrier insolvencies, a workers’ compensation insurer known as Guarantee Insurance Co. was declared insolvent in 2017—a rarity in the usually profitable workers’ comp line of business. Regulators blamed owner Steve Mariano for diverting more than $15 million and using the funds for “no discernible business purpose,” something Mariano has disputed. News reports and lawsuits at the time raised questions about the entrepreneur’s purchase of a multi-million-dollar mansion, a condominium and a yacht in south Florida. A few months later, the Fort Lauderdale insurance technology and back-office and underwriting services firm,…

Britain has designated cloud service providers Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle as critical third-party suppliers to its financial sector, bringing them under direct regulatory oversight. The move is aimed at strengthening the resilience of financial firms by reducing the risk of widespread disruption from cyber attacks or technology outages. “As banks, insurers and financial market infrastructures become increasingly reliant on cloud services, disruption at a major supplier could affect multiple firms at the same time, potentially impacting services customers depend on,” the government said in a statement on Friday. The government designated Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd, Google Cloud EMEA Ltd.,…

Apple Inc. sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, accusing the artificial intelligence startup and its hardware chief of engaging in a coordinated campaign to steal information about upcoming products. The iPhone maker said in a suit Friday that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees to share information, components, drawings and other materials related to upcoming products — part of efforts by the AI company to develop its own suite of devices. As part of the litigation, filed in the Northern District of California, Apple also named Tang Tan, the chief hardware officer at OpenAI. He was previously Apple’s vice president of product…

One out of every 50 employees working at a group of 30 large insurers is an AI specialist, according to an analysis published by a benchmarking firm, which ranks Allianz, AXA and Chubb as AI talent leaders. For London-based Evident, an intelligence platform that specializes in tracking AI adoption across financial services, measures of AI talent leaders include counts of AI specialists in carrier workforces and assessments of carriers’ AI development programs. An AI talent score is one component of the Evident AI Index for Insurance—a metric developed by Evident to gauge the overall AI maturity of a selected group…

The New York Times in a court filing on Friday accused the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of illegally retaliating against the newspaper for its coverage of President Donald Trump’s administration by suing it for passing over a white man for a top editorial role. The countersuit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks to dismiss the EEOC’s lawsuit filed in May, a declaration that the agency’s actions violate the newspaper’s rights to free speech and due process under the U.S. Constitution, and other remedies. The Times denied the agency’s claims and said its aspirational diversity goals played no role in…

By Andrew G. Simpson New York City has taken the next steps toward realizing its vision of a city-backed insurance program for affordable housing providers. The city has selected Pinnacle Actuarial Resources to provide actuarial analysis and technical support. Also, the city has issued a Request for Expression of Interest (RFEI) to the private sector seeking proposals to design, structure and operate an insurance program capable of reducing premiums by at least 20% for a meaningful share of the city’s affordable and rent-stabilized housing stock. Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced his intentionto create the insurance program in April as part…

Declarations

By Ezra Amacher A federal appeals court this month affirmed the conviction of a former Texas police chief who arranged the destruction of a personal vehicle, falsely reported it stolen, and received insurance proceeds. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Christopher Filline, a police chief in Castroville, conspired with a colleague to commit wire fraud. Filline argued the government failed to show there was agreement to a scheme between two parties. In 2016, Filline and his wife were under serious financial stress, facing $30,000 in credit card debt,…

A recent Supreme Court decision that is widely viewed as a significant development in transportation litigation is particularly worth examining in the context of negligent hiring claims against freight brokers. The court’s decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC holds that such claims fall within the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act’s (FAAAA) safety exception and therefore are not preempted, resolving a longstanding circuit split and removing a powerful threshold defense that brokers had increasingly relied upon. For insurance carriers, however, especially those insuring shippers, the more important question to be considered is not what Montgomery says about broker liability…