Today I found out that Lisa Moore, the president and owner of Accelerated Claims Services and Sundance Copy Services in Santa Ana, California, is the one behind Claim Crazy with her two partners: her claims supervisor Allen Kennedy, and an insurance defense attorney who practices in Hawaii named Katharine Nohr. 

The objective behind Claim Crazy is that it’s just for pure fun and entertainment.  Lisa wants all claims adjusters in the world to hop on to www.claimcrazy.com and tell their tales about their funniest, most outrageous, and most remarkable claims.  It’s a giggle and a gaffaw.  That’s what it’s all about. 

I remember some time in the 1980s, the claims manager of Scott Wetzel Services in Los Angeles told me about a claim involving a laborer who while sitting at a workbench cutting wood held in a vice, injured his penis while wearing a heavy leather apron.   Another adjuster told me a claimant who had just gone through the change as a transsexual filed a workers’ comp claim for a urinary infection he/she got arising out of and in the course of his employment, because he had to hold in his urine at work because the women in the office wouldn’t allow him into the ladies’ room. 

Now www.claimcrazy.com has more claims that really made me laugh when I checked them out today.  I tripped on the one about the laborer on the roof who had nowhere to relieve himself, so he bent over the high roof and while holding onto a branch of a near-by tree, the branch suddenly broke and down he went.   Then a couple of property adjusters who went to check out wind damage to a roof, had the very wind that caused the damage knock over their ladder and strand them on the roof!  They did find an escape route without the ladder, but had to run from mad dogs in order to survive!

All in a day’s work.  Lisa says she had a lot of clients who wanted her to go on Face Book, so she went on Face Book and didn’t find it so informative or fascinating. “I saw too many silly comments,” she said.  “So, I thought… what could I do that would be insurance related?”  So she thought about the fact that everybody involved in claims has a crazy claim story--attorneys, doctors, adjusters… they all have their stories.  Thus, she and her partners developed www.claimcrazy.com and it just went live on August 8th 2010. 

Now, every month the site is giving away a $100 gift card to the writer of the story that is voted the best story of that month by all the Users.  Claims professionals, doctors, lawyers, interpreters, ANYBODY involved with claims can register free of charge (there is no membership fee, it’s completely free) and enter a story and read the stories posted by others.  Next to each story there’s a “thumbs up and a thumbs down” box where users can check the box to vote on whether it’s hot or it’s not.  Therefore, the best story is voted on by the very users who read and report crazy claims. 

Lisa Moore started Accelerated Claims Services in 1997, and to this day she maintains several small employers as clients.   For many years she handled Mission Linens and Uniforms and still handles their run-off claims—many of which will last seemingly forever, she quips.  Lisa likes being a small boutique Third Party Administrator; that way she can give her own style of special service to her bevy of small employer clients.  “I never wanted to be the biggest player out there.  But I always wanted to be the best.  So, I’m very proud of that,” Lisa said.   She started her copy service called Sundance Copy Services in 2001.

Now the fun with www.claimcrazy.com will all be supported by advertising, and Lisa is hoping to draw many service providers from all over the world to buy advertising space.  She wants the site to be a worldwide happening, not just a thing for California or the Nation.  Because Lisa believes crazy claims happen everywhere in the world.  Already, an adjuster from England has posted a crazy claim story. 

So, come one, come all.  Go onto www.claimcrazy.com and tell your wildest, funniest, most amusing, and most outrageous claim story.  You never know; you might win the prize! 

Readers may write to writer Lonce LaMon at lonce@adjustercom.com.