Hunton Insurance Recovery Blog

In a recent featured article for Aon plc, Hunton Andrews Kurth insurance coverage lawyers Kevin Small and Alice Weeks, along with Aon’s Adam Furmansky, discussed the evolving nature of social engineering claims and the importance of understanding how an insured’s crime policy will respond to these claims.

A federal court recently denied an insurer’s motion to dismiss an insured’s claim for declaratory relief. The insurer argued that the policyholder’s declaratory judgment claim was redundant of its breach of contract claim. The Court ruled that “redundancy is not grounds for dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6).”

The Eighth Circuit has affirmed that an AIG affiliate must cover the full $32 million loss stemming from an employee’s embezzlement scheme. The court found that not only was National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh (“National Union”) liable for the $3 million the employee actually stole, but that the plain language of the commercial crime policy also required coverage for the $29 million in excess costs her scheme caused Cargill to endure.

Last week, the Fifth Circuit affirmed that a title company’s crime protection policy applies to cover loss from a fraudulent wire transfer. The insurer, RLI Insurance Company (RLI), had argued that the $250,945.31 transfer was not covered under the funds transfer fraud endorsement because the instruction that led to the transfer was authorized and approved by the insured, Valero Title Inc. (Valero). Specifically, a Valero employee instructed Valero’s bank to wire the funds to a fraudulent account after a fraudster posing as a lender’s employee intercepted email communications regarding a payoff transaction and deceptively instructed the transfer.

A federal court recently found that a policyholder adequately plead that a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars through wire fraud is covered under a commercial crime policy. In Landings, Yacht, Golf, and Tennis Club v. Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America Case No. 2:22-cv-00459, Landings Yacht, Golf, and Tennis Club (“Landings”) sued Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America (“Travelers”) under a crime policy for denying coverage for: (1) about $6,885.79 in unauthorized withdrawals (“First Withdrawal”) from users purporting to be Landings and (2) $575,723.95 in withdrawals made by a third-party purporting to act on behalf of Landings (“Second Withdrawal”).^[1]

Last week, Kim Kardashian settled with the SEC after the SEC announced charges against the social-media and reality TV star for promoting a crypto-currency token called EthereumMax, on her Instagram account, where she boasts more than 330 million followers, without disclosing that she received payment for the promotion. Kardashian agreed to pay $1.26 million in penalties, including the $250,000 EthereumMax paid her for promoting its crypto-tokens to potential investors. SEC Chair Gary Gensler stated that Kardashian’s case is “a reminder to celebrities and others that the law requires them to disclose to the public when and how much they are paid to promote investing in securities.”

As businesses continue to increase their reliance on technology, they are bound to face the inevitable risks associated with online transactions and other cyber exposures. This, in turn, emphasizes the importance of having the proper insurance policies and compliance methods in place to prevent or, at least, mitigate losses that ensue from these risks. In this context, many insurance policies require that there be a “direct” loss for there to be coverage, which has spawned numerous lawsuits about what the word “direct” means. The latest court to weigh in has sided with the insured and interpreted that term broadly to essentially mean proximate causation.

Recently, the Ninth Circuit dealt with a case involving a scenario that is becoming all too common. In Ernst & Haas Mgmt. Co., Inc. v. Hiscox, Inc., 23 F.4th 1195 (9th Cir. 2022), a property management company’s accounts payable clerk received several e-mails from her supervisor instructing her to pay some invoices. Unbeknownst to the clerk, these e-mails did not originate with her supervisor, but were actually part of a fraudulent scheme to elicit fraudulent bank transfers. The clerk paid off hundreds of thousands of dollars in “invoices” before becoming suspicious but, by then, it was too late and the damage was done.

A hotel operator defeated an insurer’s motion to dismiss its suit alleging that the insurer wrongfully denied coverage and acted in bad faith by denying the hotel’s $1.9 million claim arising from an employee’s fraudulent scheme diverting commissions to fictitious travel agencies. The court held that the hotel operator had suffered an “insurable loss” and rejected the insurer’s argument that the claim was barred under the policy’s suit limitations provision.

On December 9^th, the Eleventh Circuit held that a loss of over $1.7 million to scammers was covered under a commercial crime insurance policy’s fraudulent instruction provision.

On Friday, August 9^th, an Indiana Court of Appeals reversed a trial court’s ruling and allowed an insureds’ claim for bad faith based on misrepresentations in the insurer’s quote for coverage to proceed to trial.

In a recent post, we discussed the Sixth Circuit’s holding in American Tooling Center, Inc. v. Travelers Casualty and Surety Co. of America, No. 17-2014, 2018 WL 3404708 (6th Cir. July 13, 2018), where the Sixth Circuit reversed the district court’s summary judgment for the insurer, finding coverage under its policy for a fraudulent scheme that resulted in a $834,000.00 loss. The insurer, Travelers, has now asked the Court to reconsider its decision.

The Sixth Circuit, in American Tooling Center, Inc. v. Travelers Casualty and Surety Co. of America, No. 17-2014, 2018 WL 3404708 (6th Cir. July 13, 2018), reversed the District Court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the insurer in a dispute over coverage for a social engineering scheme. The policyholder, American Tooling, lost $800,000 after a fraudster’s email tricked an American Tooling employee into wiring that amount to the fraudster.

To follow up on our post last week recapping a recent Ninth Circuit decision regarding coverage for losses from a social engineering scheme, federal appellate courts continue to examine the coverage available for such losses. As Law360 highlighted, and as we previously reported (here, here, here, and here), appeals are pending in the Second, Sixth, and Eleventh circuits. These cases, some of which involve lower court findings of coverage while others do not, show that coverage for social engineering scams remains hotly contested, which means policyholders must carefully ...

A recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Byron of the Middle District of Florida has made clear that the actual words used in an insurance contract matter. The court, in Mt. Hawley Insurance Co. v. Tactic Security Enforcement, Inc., No. 6:16-cv-01425 (M.D. FL. 2018), denied an insurance company’s motion for summary judgment attempting to rely on an exclusion to deny coverage to its policyholder.  The policyholder, Que Rico La Casa Del Mofongo, operated a restaurant establishment in Orlando, Florida, and sought coverage for two negligence lawsuits filed against it for allegedly failing to prevent a shooting and another violent incident on its premises.

This week, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton issued a statement on Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) addressing the legality, fairness, and risks associated with those offerings. Although the agency’s bulletin was one of many recent public statements by federal agencies on ICOs and cryptocurrencies generally, this new warning highlights additional issues and concerns with the ICO phenomenon that are particularly relevant to insurance coverage.

The Fifth Circuit recently upheld the dismissal on summary judgment of a policyholder’s claim under a commercial crime insurance policy, affirming the trial court’s narrow interpretation of the terms “owned” and “loss,” concluding that the policyholder did not “own” the funds at issue or suffer a “loss” when it loaned those funds to the fraudsters. In so holding, the court ignored state court precedent concerning construction of those same terms.

In Cooper Industries, Ltd. v. National Union Fire Insurance Co. of Pittsburgh, Pa., No. 16-20539 (5th Cir. Nov. 20, 2017), Cooper invested its pension-plan assets into what proved to be a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Over the course of many years, Cooper invested more than $175 million into various equity and bond investments managed by fraudsters who used the investment funds in furtherance of the Ponzi scheme. After discovering the fraud, Cooper recouped a large portion of its investment and sought coverage from its commercial crime insurer for the unrecovered $35 million. The policy limited coverage to “loss” of property that Cooper “owned.” Neither term was defined in the policy.

On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey granted Travelers’ motion to dismiss Posco Daewoo America Corporation’s suit for coverage under the computer fraud provision of its crime insurance policy.  Distinguishing itself from precedent like Medidata, Principal Solutions Group, Apache and American Tooling Center, Daewoo did not seek coverage for money fraudulently transferred or stolen from its own accounts.  Instead, Daewoo sought coverage for amounts that had been designated for payment to Daewoo by a third party supplier, Allnex, and stolen from Allnex after a criminal impersonated a Daewoo employee.  The Court held that the crime policy did not cover the lost sums because Daewoo did not “own” the money stolen from Allnex.