The 7 On Your Side Investigates team has learned about a scam involving fake falls in New York that is costing everyone from construction companies to homeowners and renters.
"They're paying for it every day," James Fenniman, adjunct professor at St. John's University School of Risk Management, said. "It's a silent tax that they don't know about. So, when you have that rent increase or maintenance increase and it goes up 12%, 4% may have come from the insurance." "We never have these accidents in New Jersey or Connecticut where we do probably the same amount of work," Katz said.
Eyewitness News reviewed the surveillance video, and it shows the worker come down a ladder, take a few steps and then sit down on the sidewalk. The worker does not appear to trip or fall. A few seconds later, another worker comes down the ladder and helps the worker get up and limp away. "I'm sure maybe a lawsuit is going to come up," Ross said. "It seems like they told EMS they fell from that platform up there."
In one appeals decision referenced in a labor law update in 2016 by New York State Supreme Court Judge Elizabeth Garry, the Court of Appeals noted the "extraordinary protections of Labor Law 240 extend only to a narrow class of special hazards, and do not encompass any and all perils that way be connected in some tangential way with the effects of gravity."to Labor Law 240-241, but it has never passed.