Dashcams aren’t as common (yet) in the West as they are in the East, but we’re slowly getting there. A Canadian man shared footage of an incident that occurred last Monday, July 7, in Hamilton, Ontario, and which he claims, saved him from a car insurance fraud.

Craig Schneider was the man behind the wheel of the dash-cam car and he was getting ready to exit a McDonald’s parking lot when a pickup truck backed into him. Then, two men came out of the vehicle and approached Schneider.

“I lay on the horn and boom – they smashed into me,” Schneider told CBC Hamilton. “He started screaming at me and saying I wasn’t paying attention and saying I had to pay for the damage.”

There’s no audio in the video, so we can’t confirm Schneider’s claims, who says, they exchanged phones and went their way. But the episode wasn’t over yet, as the Canadian man said the two men called his phone a few minutes later pretending to be cops.

“But they sounded exactly the same. I even recognized their voices,” Schneider said adding that he repeatedly asked for a name and badge number, but they wouldn’t give him one. “They called from the same number minutes before. It’s just ludicrous,” he said. “This is the calibre of people we’re dealing with here.”

While Schneider is convinced that this was an insurance scam, Police spokesperson Debbie McGreal-Dinning said the department would not comment on the incident.

“Through discussion with our traffic unit and upon review of the YouTube video the Hamilton Police do not have enough information with regards to the totality of the incident and are not in a position to comment on it,” she said. “And whether it was fraud or not is a whole other story altogether.”

By John Halas

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