Destroying one's own property in order to collect insurance money is not a scam unique to the modern world. The same trick was used in Rome, as the poet Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) pointed out in the late first century C.E.

You had bought a house, Tongilianus, for two hundred thousand. An accident, all too common in Rome, took it away. A million was subscribed. I ask you, Tongilianus, couldn't it look as though you set fire to your own house?

Source Martial, Epigrammata 3 52, translated by D R Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1993)