Insurance faker Who Supposedly Died at Sea to Claim £680k Life Policy, Now Sells Underwear on Filipino Market Stall

Just to reiterate the fervent understanding that (insurance policy) crime doesn’t pay, you only have to take a look at the well-publicised case of John Darwin, the male contingent of the husband and wife team who attempted to defraud their life insurance provider out of a sum bordering on £680,000 nearly 14 years ago.

In one of the highest profile cases involving insurance swindles, Darwin and his (seemingly hapless, yet compliant) wife, Anne were at the centre of a life policy scam which necessitated John to fake his own demise (based on a staged canoeing accident) so that his surviving spouse could lay claim to the (what turned out to be) £500,000 kitty.

The plan being to set up new identities and lives, well beyond what they believed to be the reaches of insurance detection, in Panama.

To cut a long story short, the Darwin’s ludicrous ploy worked to begin with, as both scarpered to start leading new lives in Central America, only for John to amble into a London police station in 2007 claiming that he had suffered amnesia all this time (all of which came as quite a shock to the deceitful couple’s sons who weren’t in on the rouse).

And when Anne was traced to Panama for her ‘reactions’ to the news from back home, she managed to perpetuate the lie right up until the point a photo emerged of them miraculously posing together (in the aftermath of his supposed death) in an estate agents in Panama. Suffice to say they both paid the price of their illegal activities with stints spent at Her Majesty’s Pleasure after being charged with fraud and money-laundering.

Fast forward a decade or more though and according to www.mirror.co.uk John Darwin has been recently traced ‘living the life’ in Manila with his new Filipino wife, on whose underwear-selling market stall he apparently works, whilst residing in a cramped room and supplementing his meagre wage with a basic state pension.

Hardly leading the exotic or glamorous high life for his wrong-doings, it clearly shows you that trying to dupe the insurance industry certainly doesn’t pay dividends and hardly seems worth the trouble he went to by faking his own death at sea in a freak/tragic canoeing accident that simply never was.