Talk About Insurance Fraud! Big Tech Floods Pols’ In-Boxes With Fake Emails In Support Of Hochul’s Car Premium Ploy

ALBANY — They say that dead men tell no tales — but in Albany, apparently, they can still send emails.

Several state lawmakers say they have received hundreds, if not thousands, of form emails generated by Citizens For Affordable Rates, the Uber-funded organization that has spent more than $8 million supporting Gov. Hochul’s attempt to reduce auto insurance premiums by making it harder for crash victims to get full compensation for their injuries.

At least one came from a dead man.

Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha (D-Esopus) said she received one of the emails from Leslie Jenkins asking her to back Gov. Hochul’s proposal.

“For most of us, driving isn’t a luxury,” the April 6 letter stated. “It’s how we get to work, take our kids to school and manage our daily lives. But a broken system is driving costs higher and making it harder for people to pay their bills.”

But this email didn’t add up: Leslie Jenkins died in 2015.

On closer inspection, many of the emails were from people who said they didn’t send them, they disagree with Hochul’s plan or, in Jenkins’s case, are dead.

Hochul’s car insurance proposal centers on the idea (debunked by Streetsblog) that auto insurance premiums have risen due to excessive litigation and rampant fraud. To remedy this, she included language in her executive budget proposal that would curtail some crash victims’ rights to seek damages and compensation following an incident and tweaked the penal code to make it easier to prosecute auto insurance fraud. Lawmakers are skeptical, and claim they have not seen sufficient proof that her proposal will reduce auto insurance premiums. Car insurance negotiations between the state Legislature and the governor have been slow-moving as a result.

In the process, special interest groups like the New York State Trial Lawyers, who do not support Hochul’s proposal, insurance companies and Uber have been trying to sway lawmakers to their side in a pricey lobbying war. A large part of that war has been fought through email outreach, which has taken some troubling turns.

Another of Shrestha’s constituents, Neil Bettez of New Paltz, told the lawmaker that he’d also been caught up in the fake email blast.

“Clearly this is fake.,” Bettez wrote in a real email. “In addition to the fake email someone sent to Sarahana, I have probably received at least a half dozen emails and phone calls each day since I filled out the request for insurance estimates.”

And Keith Jenkins, Leslie’s son, was upset when Streetsblog told him about his late father’s inclusion in the deluge of fake emails.

“I’d be perfectly happy if whatever they’re doing stopped by whatever means necessary,” he said.

Assembly Member Dana Levenberg (D-Ossining) said she had a different problem. For some reason, her office had been faxed to death rather than emailed. Levenberg and her staff identified potentially fraudulent faxes among the mass of paper before deciding to unplug the machine.

“She couldn’t find the ones she [a staff member] spot-checked in a list of registered voters,” she said. “Which could very well mean the names and addresses don’t mesh.”

State lawmakers like Assembly Member Jen Lunsford (D-Monroe County), state Senate Insurance Chair Jamaal Bailey (D-Bronx), Assembly Member Jonathan Rivera (D-Buffalo) and Assembly Member Karen McMahon (D-Western New York) all told Streetsblog they’d been bombarded with between 300 and 5,000 emails from alleged constituents.

Lunsford and Rivera said they’d also identified fraudulent emails in their in-boxes.

Some of their colleagues haven’t really noticed the flood of emails. According to Assembly Member Kalman Yeger (D-Brooklyn), “It’s no different from all the other robotrash we get.”

Streetsblog reached out to state Sen. Andrew Gounardes’s (D-Brooklyn) office, and at first, the office wasn’t aware of any fake emails mixed in with the avalanche of messages from Citizens For Affordable Rates.

But Gounardes’s spokesperson, Billy Richling, found one in less than half an hour after we asked.

“We sent this person a response from our office to the form email,” Richling said, “and then they responded, ‘I didn’t send this email, but my name and information are signed to it. How is that even possible?'”

That part is unclear.

Uber, despite funding Citizens For Affordable Rates, has an independent system for sending form emails, according to Senior Director of Public Policy Josh Gold, and the company was unaware this was happening.

Representatives for Citizens For Affordable Rates did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Newsday reported that the source of the emails could have been an (out-of-date) database that Citizens For Affordable Rates was sending on behalf of customers, while the organization blamed “technical anomalies.”

Citizens For Affordable Rates — yes, it spells CAR — is a driving force for most of the pro-insurance reform advertising and messaging flooding New Yorkers’ phones, computers, televisions, newspapers and magazines. It has spent more than $8 million of Uber’s money in the process.

Astroturfing — also known as misleading the public, government officials and the press by manufacturing support for a legislative issue — is a normal feature of the Albany landscaping, but the manner in which it’s been done raises questions.

“When you’re spending more, like unimaginable amounts of money on a campaign, and you’re hiring all sorts of consultants to run the campaign for you, then the quality control is all over the place, depending on the quality of the consulting that’s running the program,” said Blair Horner, senior adviser at New York Public Interest Research Group. “Things can blow up in your face if you’re not careful.”

Shrestha said that the email strategy is potentially criminal, though spokespeople for Attorney General Letitia James did not respond to questions. James has investigated similar issues before.

In 2021, she released a report detailing how broadband companies spent $4.2 million generating what would be perceived as grassroots support for ending net neutrality (a policy where providers couldn’t charge more for higher speeds), but in practice, it was an effort to use batch public records data to generate 22 million public comments that were sent to the Federal Communications Commission. According to the report, more than 8.5 million of those comments were fake.

In that case, some comments did indeed come from dead people as well as people who didn’t consent to being involved. James characterized that as a deceptive business practice, and more than $5 million in fines were issued.

The state budget is 17 days late.