I caught an episode of the TV programme Rip off Britain today which had an item about insurance companies writing off peoples cars when they had an accident and paying out very little for the written off vehicle when it would have been possible to repair it.

Having seen the item there was one of the stories that made me wonder who was trying to perpetrate the rip off, although often with reporting on television it is hard to get to the truth as they frequently don’t tell the full story.

The case in question involved a father and son whose Range Rover would not start and according to the story the AA took it away to repair it under their insurance which seemed a little odd as I would have thought the correct thing to do would have been to take it to a Range Rover garage if it needed repair.

It transpired later that the vehicle had suspension damage as well as the problem of not starting so the insurance company wrote it off and I believe attempted to pay the father and son an amount which they said was not the true value of the vehicle and they thought it was worth considerably more.

The story didn’t seem to make sense to me from the start but I may have got the wrong end of the stick but I believe the father and son were implying that the suspension had been damaged when the Range Rover was taken away by the AA.

I am what might be described as a petrolhead, in that I have quite a few cars and appreciate and understand the workings of them and everything that goes with maintaining a car properly.

This story just didn’t ring true and I thought that reading between the lines it felt more like the father and son had damaged the Range Rover before calling the AA to say it wouldn’t start and were actually the ones that were trying a scam, I could be completely wrong but it just felt like that.

There are a considerable number of scams going round at the moment, from the one from HMRC that you need to pay your tax and the one from the Post Office which says you need to pay the postage for a parcel you are expecting which tend to make one sceptical about everything.

I have been around for quite a few years now so have developed a bit of a feel for things that aren’t quite right and often if something doesn’t feel right it frequently isn’t right, as they say if something seems to good to be true it probably is.