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Cigar Fraud

Very funny. So funny that I'll type it here in case the link goes dead.

A man from Charlotte, North Carolina, having purchased a case of very expensive cigars, insured them against, among other things, fire. Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile, the man filed a claim against the insurance company, stating that the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires."

The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. The man sued - and won.

In delivering the ruling the judge, agreeing that the claim was frivolous, stated nevertheless that the man held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure against fire, without defining what it considered to be an "unacceptable fire," and was obliged to pay the claim. Rather than endure a costly appeal process the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid the man $15,000 for the rare cigars he lost in "the fires."

After he cashed the cheque, however, the company had him arrested on 24 counts of arson. With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the man was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

Now that's what I call justice!

3 Responses to "Cigar Fraud"

  1. Hilarious, but, of course, false. Snopes has the skinny.

  2. It won the Criminal Darwin Awards in 1999, so there's little chance of it disappearing from the web. It's truthfulness is widely debated, however. It's on a ton of joke pages and also on a lot of "look at this idiot" kind of pages.

    True or false, it's still damned funny. =)

  3. My old business law professor had us read that joke as a part of our reading assignments. It's classic.