A Handy Scam?

 Julija Adlesic is a woman who really needed a hand ....

Self Mutilating For Money

.... she certainly needs some common sense!

She was apparently happy to cut off her own hand with a circular saw in an attempt to scam €1m Euros ($1,191,700, £867,629) in an insurance payout. The plan was apparently initiated by her boyfriend and his father, and a court in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana heard that she had taken out five insurance policies in the 12 months prior to her "accident".

She had claimed that the loss of her hand above the wrist, happened as she cut some tree branches. She and four relatives were arrested at a hospital in 2019 (but two were later released), and the trial took place in September 2020.

The court was told that she and her boyfriend had intentionally left her severed hand behind, rather than bringing it with them, apparently in an attempt to ensure the disability was permanent, but amazingly the Slovenian authorities managed to recover it in time to sew it back on ... although how much movement she has recovered in it is not reported.

The police found that the boyfriend had also made internet searches about artificial hands in the days before the hand removal, which they said was proof that the whole incident was an attempted insurance scam. Ms Adlesic maintained her innocence throughout the trial, saying 'no one wants to be crippled', and that her 'youth had been destroyed' ....

She was found guilty and sentenced to  two years in prison, while her boyfriend was given a three-year sentence., and his father was also given a one-year suspended sentence.

Now you might think that this was an extreme example, but in fact there are a surprisingly large number of people prepared to lose a limb in order to make often comparatively small amounts of money. In fact in the late 1950s and early 60s, the Florida pan-handle become responsible for two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident insurance claims in the United States, and nearly all these claims were centred on one town: Vernon, Florida, which gained the nickname 'Nub City', because so many people had lost a limb or eye. 

Vernon Florida - aka Nub City

Of course it all turned out to a widespread insurance scam, where residents would dismember themselves for an insurance payout. This was because Vernon had apparently fallen on very hard times, with the loss of the steamboats that had once passed through the town, and no rail or major road links passing through the town. The major employer, the saw mill, had just closed and put the town in to a permanent recession.

The residents of the town took to shooting their own limbs off, after taking out insurance policies .... some were even prepared to saw their own limbs off .... no one knows how the idea first started, but after the early claims received payouts of $5,000 to $10,000, the amounts insured and claimed rose quickly (One farmer got $1,000,000 from a claim for a lost foot, after a court case by the insurers failed to get a jury conviction). 

It was reported by one insurance company, that there was one man who had taken out insurance policies with them and 28 or 38 other companies. By the middle of the 1960s, 50 of the towns 700 residents were members of the so called “Nub Club,” and insurance investigators started to challenge them.

One investigator, John Healey for the Continental National American insurance group, famously reported that “Vernon’s second-largest occupation was watching hound dogs mating in the town square, its largest was self-mutilation for monetary gain. To sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City, watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere.”

Attempts to prosecute the claimants had proved difficult because juries couldn't believe that people would mutilate themselves to this degree for money .... in fact what stopped the practise in the late 1960's was that insurance premium rates became too high for the residents, and that the insurers simply refused to accept policies from anyone in Vernon and Florida pan-handle area.

The film-maker Errol Morris tried to make a documentary about 'Nub City', but was in receipt of death threats, and was even seriously assaulted by the marine veteran son of a Nub Club member. He was forced to abandon the original idea but released the footage shot in a film called 'Vernon, Florida', which instead concentrated on the eccentric residents of the town.

I've no doubt that there are many other instances of self mutilation for insurance, but possibly never again on such an industrial scale as in Nub City.