Three people were sentenced this week in California for an insurance fraud scam in which they wear bear costumes and damaged luxury cars.
Alfiya Zuckerman, Ruben Tamrazian, and Vahe Muradkhanyan all pled no contest to felony insurance fraud on Thursday and were sentenced to 180 days in jail, while Ararat Chirkinian, a fourth individual implicated in the scheme, is slated for a preliminary hearing in September.
The four were nabbed after submitting videos of false car attacks to three companies. However, one group of investigators noted the “bear” in a Rolls-Royce moved more like a human, as reported by The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian. In a news release, Ricardo Lara, commissioner of California’s Department of Insurance, stated that what appeared to be unbelievable was indeed so. “Insurance fraud is a serious crime that increases consumer costs, and no scheme is too outrageous for us to investigate,” Lara added.
State investigators initiated “Operation Bear Claw” when State Farm Insurance filed a claim alleging that a bear entered a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost and destroyed the interior, along with video of the attack, the department claimed.
A claims investigator noticed that the bear was moving less like a bear and more like a human, and a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife confirmed that the alleged bear was “clearly a human in a bear suit.”
The officials also stated that brown bears had not been sighted in California since the 1920s.
Investigators then discovered two comparable claims—one for a 2015 Mercedes G63 and one for a 2022 Mercedes E350—that were submitted to other insurance companies with similar videos and claimed to have happened at the same location on the same day.
Law enforcement personnel later issued search warrants and discovered a bear suit with fake claws at the defendants’ residence.
“It’s definitely out of the ordinary,” Capt. Eric Hood, who led the California Department of Insurance’s investigation into the alleged bear attacks, told The Times.
“I don’t think we saw anything to that extent in the past where they got a bear suit,” he said. “It’s unique.”