on Thursday night hurricane Helen and its 140 mph winds made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region it was deadly the full extent of the damage won't be known for weeks and residents know rebuilding after the storm is likely to be as daunting as the storm itself it's been 2 years since hurricane Ian hit Southwest Florida and an estimated 50,000 homeowners are still locked in battles with their insurance companies tonight you will hear from insurance insiders who say after years of diligently paying premiums homeowners are being misled by their insurance carriers the whistleblowers who are all
licensed adjusters tell us after Hurricane Ian several insurance carriers were using altered damage reports to deceive customers the story will continue in a moment as hurricane Ian slammed into Florida with 150 mph winds Jeff rapkin took this video from the porch of his home about 40 miles south of Sarasota all the trees are coming down they don't normally looks like this everything's coming apart my name is Jeff rapkin I live in Northport Florida rapkin an adoption attorney and his wife Jenny raised three children in this home home and weathered more than a half dozen hurricanes
inside it but Ian they say was different it just it sat above our heads it wouldn't move I mean it was a a nightmare and it went on for how long 11 hours 11 hours it felt like the hurricane was inside the house we couldn't keep the windows closed that is the rapkins house a neighbor just happened to be filming when their steel roof was ripped off when the storm fir finally passed the rapkins could see clear skies through the new hole hurricane Ian punched in their ceiling There Were Trees on and around their house
the roof was shredded and everything inside was soaked the rapkins lined up their losses on the curb and called their insurance company Heritage to begin the claims process it sent a licensed adjuster to the house to assess the damage did you get the feeling speaking to him and showing him around the property that he understood oh yeah what was happening here that this was serious he was really nice he was thorough and he said your house is probably going to need to be completely rebuilt which is why the rafkin were floored when they finally got
a check from their insurance company 3 months later they sent us a report from the adjuster which said that it would cost $155,000 to put our home back to pre hurricane conditions they sent you $115,000 $15,000 and so uh the the deductible was taken out so it was was $110,000 and then our public adjuster took $11,000 out so we had n when you called and said $9,000 are you kidding me what was the reaction the reaction was uh this is the decision we've made and I started to pray for for Mr uh uh Jordan Lee's
untimely demise because I was so angry we found Mr Jordan Lee very much alive do you remember the rapkin family yes ma'am Lee is the adjuster who went to the rapkins home after the storm what do you remember about them their property a two story home metal roof that was blown off by hurricane in and the interior of the home was just it was soaked Jordan Lee has been a licensed adjuster in Florida since 2017 after major disasters most insurance companies use third-party firms who hire adjusters likely to help them with the thousands of claims
Lee says after he assesses a home he always leaves his cell phone number with the homeowners so they can call him if they have any questions after Hurricane Ian homeowners did what were they saying cussing me out left and right up and down you know how could you do this to us it was really bad actually and out of the the thousands of claims that I've handled I've never had phone calls like that confused he went back to compare the damage report he wrote for the rapkins to the one the insurance company sent to them
that's your work correct and this is what they were given totally different totally different you said they needed a new roof I did and this report says what it reads as a repair was that roof able to be repaired in your opinion not in my opinion no later Jordan Lee learned a desk adjuster who'd never been to the rapkins home had deleted entire sections of his report but left his name and his license number on it making it look like his work did anybody ever alert you hey we're making a change to this report no
nobody told me the only way that I knew was the homeowner calling me it is standard procedure for field adjusters to collaborate with those back in the office to make minor edits but Jordan Lee says that is not what happened with the rapkins report did you put a dollar amount on how much you thought they were owed 231,000 857 what did the insurance carrier come up with $1 15,46 n48 cents so uh quite a bit of difference that's not a difference of opinion no Jordan Lee says as he dug further into his work from Hurricane
Ian he was stunned to discover the rapkins weren't the only family whose report was altered it was basically all of them I mean I handled 46 of them 44 of them were changed were any of your reports changed to give the policy owner more money no it was always down it was always down down by as much as 98% one estimate he wrote for $488,000 was changed to 13,000 another from $239 to 3,000 on December 13th 2022 my name is Jordan Lee I'm independent insurance adjuster and I work for the insurance companies Jordan Lee and
two other adjusters testified to Florida lawmakers about what one Watchdog group called systematic criminal fraud by the insurance companies the scheme was repeated over and over again not only on my estimates but on estimates written by other adjusters Ben Mandel has been a licensed adjuster since 2017 he did not work for Heritage but says 18 of the 20 reports he wrote for another carrier after Hurricane Ian were altered and he says he and other adjusters were instructed by some of their managers to leave damage off reports and there was a deliberate scheme to do this
and it wasn't just with one carrier doing this this was six carriers that we discovered were doing this in the State of Florida they all got the memo which was which was we're not going to replace roofs asphalt shingle roofs we're not going to replace them we're going to repair them Mandel says he refused to leave off roofs they were asking me to do something that was illegal and why was it illegal it's illegal because when I go out to make a damage estimate I have to put what the damage is not what they want
the damage to be and so if I leave something off that's supposed to be on there I can be prosecuted for that so theany is telling you leave the roofs off we're not paying for roofs but you keep writing these Ro replac corre I wrote the way they're supposed to be and you get fired and I got fired now Ben Mandel and five other whistleblower adjusters are represented by attorney Steven bush bush worked as a public adjuster for more than a decade what the carriers are doing in some instances what they've said was if the
policy holder needs a new roof then we're going to make them make us pay in other words file a lawsuit and then we'll pay you for your roof but unless they do that they're not getting the roof paid for they're not getting it they're not getting it most people will not stand up and fight I cannot tell you how many people come to me and say hey what was I going to do I had to replace my roof and do you think the insurance companies know that they're betting on that most people are just going
to roll over ABS no question they know that they're playing the odds and they're winning Florida's Insurance Market has been a risky gamble for years after a decade of cost storms several National Carriers exited Florida smaller regional carriers stepped in but not all were up to the job since 2021 at least nine insurance companies in Florida have collapsed and some of the remaining ones Steven Bush says alter damage reports and is it just in Florida I now have evidence in six different states of where carriers are manipulating the estimates changing them and then Mis representing
to policy holders that it's the work product of the fied adjuster and did most times the policy owner have any idea they has no clue yeah there's almost no transparency in the claims process Doug Quinn is the executive director of the American policy holders Association an advocacy group he started after his home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 the victims of insurer fraud are the last people to find out that they were victims of insurer fraud so when the insurance carriers say look it's our right we're allowed to go back in there and do
what we want to these adjuster reports you would say you're not allowed to take somebody who has dutifully paid premiums for years and when they need their insurance cheat them and shave 70 80 or 90% off their claim you're not allowed to do that you are allowed to disagree with you know the minutia but coming in to that degree and faking the facts on a claim is not acceptable and there should be legal consequences for that if you really want to see change in the industry put somebody in handcuffs attorney Steven Bush says he turned
over what he says is evidence of insure fraud to State investigators and Florida opened a criminal investigation but 2 years after the storm Florida's made no arrests we know frauds investigated all the time when it comes to homeowners right you know that if you put in contractors and Public Adjusters everybody who's LED with the consumer who cost the insurance industry money those cases get investigated and prosecuted rather quickly end aggressively all we are asking is that cases that are alleged to be perpetrated by the insurance carriers or the vendors that they hire are just as
aggressively investigated and prosecuted when fraud is found Quinn says it's difficult to know how many policy holders may have been given less money than they were owed but 2 years after the storm every unrepaired home and tarp tells a story at the rafkin mold and mother nature are gnawing away at what's left of their home and upstairs oh all right oh well there's there's the sky this isn't a hole this is a crack down the middle of your house there's I can put my whole arm up through here that split roof is an open wound
for the rafkin who still have to mow the lawn and make mortgage payments on their rotting home every month they're also paying rent on an apartment nearby and $4,000 a year to Heritage for home insurance and you're still paying I'm still paying oh yeah they the the premiums went up so we're still paying we're still paying and the premiums went up and I can't get another insurance company obviously Jeff and Jenny rapkin filed a lawsuit against Heritage accusing it of breach of contract and fraud in a statement to 60 Minutes Heritage said it couldn't comment
on specific policy holders but aims to pay every eligible claim and had no intention to deceive the company says in its own random sample about 42% of damage reports were revised downward and 26% were revised upward Heritage says that since hurricane Ian it has made many reforms including updating its claims processing software which it blames for not including the names of desk adjusters who altered reports do you think that was a m like just an innocent mistake originally I did I said oh maybe they made an error and what do you think now I think
they did it on purpose and I think people are getting letters that say they're not covered when they are this is a con that's what this is this is make them go away at all costs we're not paying
