A video that was submitted as part of an insurance claim in January appeared to capture a disturbing scene: a brown bear ransacking a Rolls-Royce that was parked in a Southern California driveway.
“Upon further scrutiny of the video, the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume,” the department said in a news release. The scratch marks inside the vehicles, it said, were made with a claw-like kitchen accessory usually used to shred meat. The California Department of Insurance said in its news release that the first insurance company “suspected fraud” after it received a claim related to a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost on January 28 in Lake Arrowhead, California, a resort area about 140 kilometres north-east of Los Angeles.