Tackling new developments in car insurance fraud and increasing cases of staged collisions using written-off cars are some of the priorities of the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council (NMVTRC) for the next 12 months.

Other priorities for its future strategic planning include tackling key theft via residential burglaries, continuing reform of the scrap metal market in SA and WA, exploring ancillary uses of stolen cars in other crimes, young offender management and keeping up with technological advances in cars.

Insurers are seeing increasing incidents of insurance fraud in which “stolen” cars suddenly reappear immediately after the insurer pays out a total loss, CEO Geoff Hughes told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

In past cases, owners would burn their own cars, then report them as stolen to make a fraudulent claim.

“It bears further investigation to see exactly what the frequency is, and then think about [what] mitigating countermeasures might be,” he said.

The NMVTRC will look at sharing better data about incidents of theft, car makes, models and locations, so insurers can triage claims data against the NMVTRC’s theft data to help them deduce if a claim might be fraudulent.

Drivers are also increasingly using written-off vehicles to stage collisions with another vehicle, or forcing a real at-fault car accident, leading to a slew of false insurance claims, Mr Hughes says.