According to investigators, a group of Los Angeles County residents were arrested after allegedly staging bear attacks in costume to receive payouts from their car insurance providers.
A press release from the California Department of Insurance said that the investigation, which was called “Operation Bear Claw,” found that three of the four people made similar insurance claims after a “bear” damaged the inside of their cars in Lake Arrowhead, a mountain community in San Bernardino County.
One of the insurance companies thought there might have been fraud, and investigations began. They found that on January 28, 2024, multiple claims were made for the same location.
The claimants allegedly showed their insurance companies video of what they said was a bear damaging the inside of their cars.
All of those videos were taken outside of the same house in the area, and they were meant to show the bear getting into the cars and crawling around.
Yet “upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” a CDI release said.
Investigators asked a biologist from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to help them make sure that what they thought was true. The biologist watched all three videos of the fake attacks and also said that it was “clearly a human in a bear suit.”
Investigators from the insurance company sent pictures of scratch marks on the seats and door panels of the cars.
Investigators said the claims were made for a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost, a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG, and a 2022 Mercedes E350. The insurance companies were cheated out of a huge $141,839 in money.
The four suspects were arrested with the help of Glendale police and the California Highway Patrol. They were identified as Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39, from Valley Village.
Each was charged with both insurance fraud and plotting to do it.