A court has ruled that a man deliberately put himself in the path of a train that cut off both his leg so he could claim a $3.2 million insurance payout.
The man, named only as Sandor Cs due to privacy laws, lost both of his legs after they were run over by a train in Nyircsaszari, Hungry in 2014.
He is said to have taken out fourteen high-risk life insurance policies in the year prior to the incident, Ladbible reports.
Despite the court’s ruling that Sandor’s incident was deliberate, he has claimed his he is innocent.
Sandor insisted that he ended up on the tracks as he had stepped on a shard of glass that caused him to fall in front of the moving train.
He also claimed he had been financially advised to take the fourteen insurance policies out prior to the incident.
“I find the ruling very peculiar. Naturally, it isn’t what I expected. I am disappointed,” he said.
“I need to see this through to the end because, as is, this is not right, and the court must feel the same way.”
Since the incident, Sandor has been using prosthetic limbs and a wheelchair after his legs were amputated to the knee.
These paired with medical bills and the loss of his job has made Sandor’s financial situation pretty bad and it doesn’t seem like he will be getting a payout to make it any better.
Sandor is now faced with a 2-year suspended prison sentence.
And, on top of that, he has been ordered to pay $6,326 in legal costs.
Big yikes.
Now, another woman has made headlines for doing a similar stunt in hopes of an insurance payout…
A woman cut off her own hand with a saw hoping to receive a large insurance payout, but she was given a prison sentence instead.
In 2019, Julija Adlesic from Slovenia, along with her boyfriend, planned to have her left hand severed above the wrist.
Adlesic used a circular saw to chop off her left hand, leaving the severed body part behind as she rushed to hospital.
As it turns out, this was all part of a calculated plan by the woman, ruling out any attempts by surgeons to reattach her body part.
The aftermath
At the time, police and local officials raced to the scene of the incident and were able to recover the severed hand.
However, the ordeal was not an “accident” after all, with the courts deciding that Adlesic cut off her own hand in the hope of getting an insurance payout to the tune of $1.1 million.
The court heard that she stood to collect the massive payout, half of which to be paid immediately, after signing insurance deals with five different providers just one year before.
Why would she go to such an extreme?
Adlesic was in debt and had been going through personal bankruptcy proceedings at the time she committed the insurance fraud.
Days before the incident, her partner looked into how artificial hands work on the internet.
Prosecutors said that Abramov’s Google search was further proof the act was anything but an accident.
But, during the trial, Adlesic maintained her innocence, saying she would never cut her hand off deliberately.
“No one wants to be crippled,” she said. My youth has been destroyed.”
“I lost my hand at the age of 20,” she continued. “Only I know how it happened.”
Despite insisting she was innocent, she entered a guilty plea alongside Abramov and his parents as part of a deal with Slovenian prosecutors in 2021.
Abramov was sentenced to two years and five months imprisonment while Adlesic was initially sentenced to three years behind bars.
“We believe the sentences are fair and appropriate, and will serve their purpose,” Judge Marjeta Dvornik said at the time.
That sentence was cut in half in a second hearing, and Adlesic was freed from prison in 2022 after serving part of her 19 month sentence.