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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Even worse, it sounds like this is a standard practice in the insurance industry.

Insurance always carries a steep moral hazard in the form of the temptation to sell deceptive peace of mind, fooling their client into thinking they have purchased insurance covering a scenario which the company has no intent of actually covering. Few people will ever actually discover the deception, so it's reliably profitable. I had not heard of the "voluntary parting is not theft" schtick before today and in the absence of a prominent warning about this distinction I would consider such an insurance sale fraudulent. Further, I'd want a large punitive multiplier on the fines to account for the fact that most of the time the deception will go undiscovered.

I strongly suspect our legal system would disagree, and I'd consider that an even bigger problem.

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Completely unrelated but... I had a issue with lightning instead.

We were paying some rather expensive home insurance, one time a thief broke inside, and they did all they could to avoid paying us, ended paying the bare mininum they could, barely covering the stolen goods costs.

Still at the time it didn't looked like bad faith, just fraud checking...

But then this time lightning hit our house, the insurance response was that unless we can prove it was a direct strike against the house, it would count as "electrical fault" that is not covered, because it would be blamed on the electric company instead...

So we argued that yes, the lightning DID hit our house directly (because well, it did, the path the electricity did was very obvious, with the endpoint being the pointy metal end of the structure that holds our gate upright), they just flat out refused to come check, because the likelihood of this happening was so low that they were sure it was a waste of their time to check, and that we should bother the electricity company...

The electricity company in turn, said they detected zero fluctuations on the grid, and would not send a technician to check, that it wasn't their fault.

So that day I learned that "lightning coverage" only cover a strike on the hourse itself... a strike on the lamp-post right outside for example, doesn't count, even if it blows up everything inside your house, becase the "fault" then is the electric company.

My recent encounter with this comes from healthcare. Healthcare companies love to brag that their "prenatal maternity care is 100% covered, no deductible, no copay."

Turns out "prenatal maternity care" is simply defined as the blood pressure, weight, and fundal measurements. That's all that bullet point means.

* Ultrasound? Well, that's different. It's a lab procedure. Yep, even the 20-week "standard" anatomy scan.

* Get a non-stress test done (literally just 10 minutes worth of heart-rate monitoring)? Then it becomes a "specialist visit." You'll pay for that.

* Get any bloodwork done? Even if it's for the mother's health and not trying to do some sort of pre-natal screening? It's a diagnostic lab procedure.

* Urine samples for pre-eclampsia? Diagnostic testing.

* Mandatory (state-required) STD panel? That's diagnostic testing, too.

Turns out the ACA requires "pre-natal care" to be covered, so bragging about it in the first place is just absurd.

Is there not law on the books that cover... gosh what's it called. When something causes something else to happen in a direct way? I know in some places, there's laws that say, "If Person A slams on their brakes for no reason, and Person B has to slam on their brakes causing Person C to go off road and hit a pole, person A could be at fault"?

I'm not a lawyer but I think it's the basis of civil law (I speak for France specifically but it's kind of a general principle): any damage must be repaired by the one who caused it, by action or lack thereof, voluntarily or not.

Then of course, the difficult part is deciding who is at fault.

This is absolutely standard for the home insurance industry, which is notorious for trying to use technicalities and legalistic excuses to avoid paying out.

It's essentially trading on fraud, dead centre in that grey area of contract law where your only hope of winning a case is court action with the help of top flight lawyers - whose services you can't afford.

Of course some companies are more reputable, but there is a huge - huge - spread of integrity within the industry. No one should ever believe that just because they pay $x/yr they're covered to the extent they hope they are without checking small print and doing plenty of searches for customer feedback.

It really isn't fair to blame insurance at all. In this case they had insurance that covers the rentee against loss due to accidental damage or theft against the rentee. That insurance is entirely reasonable and rational, and does have real value: If a legitimate, good actor person rents hardware and then it get stolen out of their car or they accidentally drop it in a lake, that's valuable insurance and does probably cover most incidents.

But in this case the person theoretically covered by the insurance (their coverage obviously benefitting the one renting out the hardware, as their hardware is then made whole) is the one who caused the loss. Just as your homeowner insurance doesn't want to cover you if you burn down your own house on purpose -- the real moral hazard -- they don't want to cover this situation.

It's shitty, but the insurance served a valuable but finite purpose. The insurance was never intended for what happened here.

Finite scope of insurance: not a problem.

Deceptive marketing suggesting that the scope of an insurance policy is larger than it actually is: big problem.

It does not seem that the insurance company has deceived anyone about what is and is not covered. The deception is in how KitSplit insinuates that renters are covered when they are not.

Whoever sold the insurance to the end customer did the fraud. In this case, that probably mean KitSplit, but this sort of thing is rampant across the insurance industry proper.

Branding this as a sharing economy issue undersells the problem by an order of magnitude or two.

Our legal system does disagree, it is theft.

The voluntary parting is a concept invented by insurance companies to deny liability. It has nothing to do with criminal law which sees this as prosecutable criminal theft.

It depends on the state you live in, but by and large, it is not the same.

For example, in my home state, reneging on a rental agreement on a piece of property worth more than $100 is "Misapplication of Property," a misdemeanor.

Actually stealing the exact same camera, as opposed to deceiving the owner, is "Larceny," a felony.

Holding up the owner at gunpoint to steal the same camera is "Robbery," a much more serious felony.

The law slices and dices these things finely. Sweet talking someone into handing over his property is often a crime, but it is usually not the same crime as simply taking it.

This is incorrect. If you give over a piece of property to someone with a contract, and they fail to fulfill the contract, you've got a civil claim against them but it's not generally a crime.

Example: someone leases a car and doesn't make payments. Leasor can't call the police and claim "Janet stole my 2018 Cadillac, she stopped making payments two months ago!". Or, they can, but will be told: It's not theft.

https://criminal-law.freeadvice.com/criminal-law/white_colla...

> A key element of any larceny or theft crime is what an offender intends to do with the property after taking it. Typically, an offender is guilty of a theft crime when he takes the property of another with the intention of permanently depriving him of it. Deciding later to keep the property an offender originally intended to use temporarily and then return becomes a larceny or theft crime at the moment the offender's intent changes. The perfect example of this is a rental car you decide not to return. A lawful rental becomes a larceny or theft crime the moment you fail to return it on time with the intention of keeping it.

Other sources agree:

https://www.chamberslawfirmca.com/can-charged-grand-theft-no...

https://www.mdtriallawyer.com/failure-to-return-rental-vehic...

https://law.freeadvice.com/general_practice/contract_law/TV_...

Many state laws agree:

https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9A.56.096 (Note here both that the law here explicitly states that not returning a leased or rented item is theft, and that it is specifically presumed so when one uses a false id or address.)

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/auto-theft-l...

Including the state where the above guy lives:

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-484.html

The claim that it's simply a civil contract issue with no criminal implications is not correct.

Given that the thief in the above case also used a false identity, he is guilty of identity theft as well.

The concept also exists as "theft by conversion". For example if you rent a car and refuse to return it.

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