The worst thing you can do after an accident

When you’re in a fender bender, what’s the one thing you shouldn’t do post-accident? Not surprisingly, it involves social media!

According to the blog Daily Finance, insurance adjusters investigating your claim are going to be all over social media and the search engines to develop a digital dossier on you.

You may have heard about this with people who were faking long-term disability being caught because pictures of them doing crazy athletic things surface online. Now it’s come to auto insurance.

Sometimes the result is great as fraud rings are busted when adjusters see the victim and the supposed guilty party being good buddies on social media. The point is what you post on social media will be used against you in any claim or court case.

Meanwhile, Edmunds.com says that insurers are now trying to build a dossier of what kind of driver you are based on videos and pictures they find on your social media profiles.

If you show a photo of yourself at a bar parking lot, they’ll cast aspersions and try to say that you may have been tipsy because you like going to bars. I’m not kidding. Insurers don’t want to pay, right? So they want to be extremely aggressive with the reviews.

The best advice for you is the advice I’ve given to teens: Never post anything on social media you wouldn’t want Grandma to see. Now you’ll have to start thinking of insurance companies as Grandma!

For further reading:

• Which tickets most impact auto insurance rates?
• Confessions of an auto claims adjuster