In January, a security camera captured unnerving footage: what appeared to be a bear had forced its way into a Rolls Royce parked outside a home in the Southern California resort community of Lake Arrowhead, gouged the seats and thrashed the interior.
But a sharp-eyed auto insurer felt something was off about the furry interloper. After an investigation, the California Department of Insurance concluded that the damage wasn’t the work of a bear at all, but an attempt at insurance fraud.
“Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” the Department of Insurance said in a statement Wednesday.
Four Los Angeles-area locals were arrested and charged with insurance fraud and conspiracy after the department’s investigation found three allegedly bogus insurance claims for staged bear attacks on three cars, including the 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost.
The agency claims that Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32 and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, defrauded insurance companies of nearly $142,000 with the scheme.
These four attracted the attention of insurance detectives with a series of suspicious insurance claims, according to the department. They dubbed the investigation Operation Bear Claw.
One claim stated that a bear entered the Rolls Royce and damaged the interior in January near Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino County. As evidence, they submitted to an insurance company a black-and-white surveillance video of the purported bear moving about inside the car. It’s not uncommon in the Mountain West for hungry bears to mutilate parked cars.
The department’s detectives then found nearly identical claims for two different cars to other insurance companies, each filed with similar videos as evidence of damage.
Suspecting that the bear in question was in fact not a bear at all, detectives asked a California Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist to watch the videos and weigh in.
The verdict?
“They also opined it was clearly a human in a bear suit,” the department said.
Detectives, aided by the Glendale Police Department and the California Highway Patrol, then executed a search warrant on the suspects’ home. Among the items seized: a bear costume.
