Along with excellent service, fighting fraudulent claims is at the top of Safety's claim department's priorities. The Insurance Fraud Bureau in partnership with local police, district attorneys, and the Attorney General continues to be successful at prosecuting fraudulent claims across the state. The recent numerous arrests in Lawrence are encouraging in the battle against insurance fraud.

Our claim staff has been thoroughly trained to identify suspected fraudulent claims and has now teamed up with Safety's underwriters to combat premium avoidance fraud.

As part of this effort, Safety has obtained new software that will enable us to promptly identify these premium avoidance schemes:

• Inexperienced principal drivers who are classified as occasional only operators.
• Garaging misinformation particularly where garaging is in a lower rated territory than the home address given.
• Driver listing and usage classification.

Using this new software, Safety plans to actively exercise our authority under Paragraph 18 of the General Provisions and Exclusions section of the Massachusetts Automobile Insurance Policy to refuse to pay claims under any or all of the Optional Insurance Parts of the Policy if we have been given false, deceptive, misleading, or incomplete information that increases our risk of loss. This includes, but is not limited to information regarding place of garaging and the customary operators of a covered vehicle.

Securing the proper premium for the risk is essential to all of us. As our partners, you can help by assuring that your customer understands the consequence of misrepresentation relative to garaging locations, operator classification and use.