MSE News: Car premiums rise as insurers fail to crack down on fraud

More Spin from the insurer lobby which joe public will most likely take at face value.

Insurers reduced prices because massive savings were created when solicitor's fixed fees got slashed from April 2013. They also promised the government that premiums would reduce. This they did. But as ever, there is usually a race to the bottom when it comes to rates and they compete with each other to the point when they are then borderline profitable.

Then they get hit with claims from the dodgy drivers they have insured for cut price rates in their attempt to gain market share.

So they need to put rates up again to cover this off, but wait, they promised the government that all these costs would come down. Oh well, let's pull out our friend the fraud card again and start waving that one about again.

Insurers inflate figures and bend statistics to demonstrate whatever point they want to make and try to lay the blame elsewhere.

Previously they have claimed 7% of all motor claims were fraudulent, then that figure was adjusted down to under 2%.

Some more info here, rather than clap trap from the insurer lobby who now will just use spin to try and implement further reform for their own profit gains.

http://www.actuaries.org.uk/news/press-releases/articles/legal-changes-reduce-motor-insurance-claims

Right....
What a load of old shoe menders!

We all know what these crooked shysters are up to.

Shareholders first customer last!

OnanTheBarbarian wrote: »

I don't know and it would help if the insurance industry could define fraud, but I believe they prefer to play loose and this gives them more flexibility to bend stats to suit whatever campaign they are running.

Getting an industry to define something takes a hell of a lot of time and effort, you'd have to question if the return on investment is there to get an industry standard definition.

I cannot say for other insurers, including Aviva, but certainly petty claims inflation wasnt noted as fraud back in my claims days.

Common sense therefore would be to say to use a dictionary definition of the word which would thus include claim inflation within it. You still have the issue of how do you judge the intent required for it to be "fraud"? If that were the case then I suspect that fraud levels could be exceptionally high and more than any insurer would want to report.

It was very rare for a TP not to drop in a £20 miscellaneous expenses (telephone, postage etc) claim when going via one of the factory solicitor firms. We used to pay £10 without evidence but even that has got to be highly questionable in a non-injury case. Cant remember a single self employed person who's claim for LoE I paid in full. Plenty of dodgy valuations and false claims for personal effects/ biker leathers etc

In first party only accidents in Motor the rates are probably fairly low as most just go via network repairers. Home the rates are going to be high with faulty electronics suddenly having "accidents", a few extra bits added to theft claims etc

Fraud also has to have intent, perhaps the TP did just miss calculate their numbers for their LoE, perhaps they did think their damaged bracelet was solid 18ct gold rather than being 9ct plate? I guess this is where what you claim Aviva does comes in, draw a line under which is negotiation and over which is fraud.

Down below is the case of someone saying they didnt know that a windscreen repair under insurance counted as a claim. Do you count that as fraud or was it a mistake?

Even if you do jump through all these hoops and get your staff better at flagging fraud in your systems for MI purposes you can only tell what your actual detection rate is. Any calculation of what the total level of fraud is will never be much more than a wet finger in the air.

Nevertheless he came here to advertise his company, got found out and was deleted but now you are doing it for him.