A panel of insurance, legal and medical experts at the Florida Chamber’s 2025 Annual Insurance Summit offered a blunt assessment of the state’s fight against auto-insurance fraud: PIP reform worked, but the fraud rings adapted fast.

Moderator Ashley Kalifeh, a Partner at Capital City Consulting, said the long-plagued PIP system — an acronym for the state’s mandated $10,000 personal injury protection coverage — is finally stabilizing as cases with one-way attorneys fees work through the courts. But even the reforms highlight how distorted the old market had become.

Kalifeh noted that one lawyer filed 70,000 PIP lawsuits in 2021, illustrating how lucrative the previous system was to the lawyers the Florida Chamber refers to as “billboard attorneys.”

“Rates are decreasing but the universe of claims that still retain the old fee statute is just whittling down,” Kalifeh said.

While PIP is no longer the primary battlefield, panelists said the exploitation simply shifted over to bodily injury claims.

Bodily injury, or BI, is the part of an auto insurance policy that pays for injuries at-fault drivers cause to someone else in a crash, including their medical bills, lost wages and, in litigation, their attorneys fees and other damages.

Unlike PIP, which pays for the policyholder’s own medical costs regardless of fault, BI is third-party coverage, and the size of the available BI limits often determines how aggressively a claim is pursued.

Jessica Schmor, President of Allegiant Experts, said she now sees “very large medical bills in the bodily injury space.”

In one case, two plaintiffs from the same minor crash received nearly identical treatment plans — except one was billed for a three-level cervical disc replacement, even though Food and Drug Administration-approved devices cannot be used on more than two levels.

“The first red flag to me when I was looking at these charges, which were well in excess of $500,000, was what was going on clinically and medically?” she said before noting that the facility where the procedure was conducted charges the highest rate in the U.S.

“Charges are never reasonable,” Schmor said. “They’re not even close to what the value of health care is.”

Jordana Kahn, a Partner at Burger Meyer & D’Angelo, described the “Fraudemic” newsletter she runs to share intelligence across carriers and lawyers. Her concern: staged-accident networks have become sophisticated production lines.

Runners recruit at-fault drivers and load up the front “victim” car with as many passengers as possible, she said.

“They’ll all be on a call together, on a WhatsApp chat, and they say, ‘Okay, at this traffic light up here, come to a stop, and the rear driver is going to lightly tap into you,’” she said, adding that the grift comes in many flavors.

Sometimes the rear driver is not in on it; other times the front car will park in the middle of an intersection and the runner will T-bone an empty vehicle.

“These accidents are really mild, but the medical treatment is insane and excessive,” Khan said.

She said one of her clients is a small rental-car company with just 28 claims nationwide — all of them are in South Florida and 24 come from a single law firm, with average payouts around $350,000 each.

“They are being driven out of business,” she said.

The costs ultimately funnel down to everyday Floridians, and not only through higher auto insurance premiums. Uber’s Director of Safety & Insurance, Scott Jalowiec, said high-limit policies make the company a top target. Between 2021 and 2024, Uber’s insurance cost per trip rose 50% despite fewer reported claims. Uber isn’t eating the cost.

“This really is a consumer tax,” he said, adding that the rideshare company is now pursuing civil RICO actions in multiple states.

The panel closed with a warning: as traditional billing schemes dry up, fraud operators are getting more creative — including pivoting to exorbitantly priced experimental treatments to inflate future medical damages. And the tactics aren’t just costly; they are dangerous.

“It seems funny on its surface but these patients actually are getting harmed. I had a patient get injected with stem cells. A legitimate patient who is legitimately injured got caught up in one of these and became paralyzed for life because of some of these procedures,” Schmor said.