Four men are under arrest in Southern California after one of them donned a bear costume to feign damage to high-end cars in an insurance scam, the state Department of Insurance said.
Late Wednesday police detained Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, and Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, all of Glendale, and 39-year-old Alfiya Zuckerman, who hails from Valley Village, and charged all four with insurance fraud and conspiracy, the California Department of Insurance said in a media release. They allegedly bilked three insurance companies out of nearly $142,000, the department said.
The would-be caper started earlier this year, when an insurance company notified the agency that it suspected fraud in a claim the four men filed Jan. 28 alleging that a bear had climbed into their 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost and slashed the interior.
The claimants provided video footage of said attack, but the insurers found it barely credible, alerted authorities, and Operation Bear Claw was born.
A biologist brought in from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to scrutinize the murky video revealed the grisly truth: “It was clearly a human in a bear suit,” the insurance department said.
Investigators followed the trail to the suspects’ home, where they found the actual bear costume. And that wasn’t all.
“Detectives found two additional insurance claims with two different insurance companies, for the suspects with the same date of loss and at the same location,” the insurance department said. “Each of those claims involved two different vehicles, a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350, and the suspects again appeared to use a bear costume to make it appear that a bear also entered and damaged those vehicles. They provided the video footage to the other insurance companies as well to substantiate their claims.”
Using this method, the four filed $141,839 in fraudulent insurance claims, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara told WPMI-TV.