I like to watch YouTube, and I've just become aware of brake checking. It doesn't mean getting your brakes checked to make sure they are safe, it means hitting your brakes hard while in front of another vehicle which is going a good speed. (The "checking" part of the phrase seems to come from ice hockey.)

Sometimes vehicle 2 is tailgating, but often that is not the case. (Of course I mean the drivers are causing their vehicles to tailgate, etc, but that takes longer to say.) Often we see a vehicle change lanes to deliberately put itself in front of another (usually bigger) one. Then the driver of the first vehicle hits the brakes while driving down the open road. The results can be very bad.

Some observers think that Driver 1 is doing this to cause a wreck and to make an insurance claim, but considering the low payouts, the deductible and the possible injury, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
And with dashboard cameras getting more and more common, there are lots of videos showing what really happened.

Does anybody know what's really going on with brake checking?