In May, South Carolina's Attorney General reported that the number of insurance-fraud cases in the state had reached an all-time high in 2013. The report (via Overlawyered) is mostly just numbers, but it does include two or three examples of now-closed cases, one of which turns out to be stupid. 

This particular case was prosecuted in Darlington County (near the city of Florence). Because the three men named were prosecuted together in the same county, I assume they were all involved in a single scheme. Because two had the same last name, and all three had the same level of intelligence, I assume they were all related. Sadly, we have to assume these things because the report offers few details about the case. Just the basic facts, which to be honest are really pretty straightforward:

Brailey and his two co-defendants each claimed to have all 4 limbs amputated…. Investigation revealed that all their limbs were intact.

So basically it's a simple case involving a discrepancy between the number of limbs claimed to be missing and the number that are actually missing. It's not the first such case. It's just that here the discrepancy happens to be 12.

The population of Darlington County is only about 70,000, and I would guess that on average the number of quadruple amputations there each year is pretty close to zero. Having three such incidents in a single year, all three afflicting clients of the same insurance company, appears to have been enough to get somebody's attention at Aflac. (I'm picturing the scene from Saving Private Ryan where they run around comparing telegrams.)

What I really want to know is whether they claimed all 12 limbs were lost in the same accident, and if so what their scenario was. I'd like to assume they did but that's too much of a leap even for me.