Advantage Gold Mobile Insurance Problem

Uncle_Junior

Hi everyone,

I'm a long-time reader of these forums but have never felt the need to post before, hopefully someone can help me out with a problem that I have regarding my Natwest Advantage Gold mobile phone insurance.

I am from Manchester but currently in the States for a few months on business and a couple of weeks ago I had my iPhone 4 stolen from a restaurant. I contacted my advantage gold insurers and they have agreed to pay out, albeit only for the cost of a refurbished iPhone.

My issue though is that they say it is their policy not to send me the money until I am back in the UK, I can understand them being unwilling to send cheques or replacement phones abroad but cannot understand why they won't simply send it to my Wife back in England who can then pay the money into my account.

I'm interested to know if anyone has come across this kind of problem before and can suggest any way around it? My current thinking is to simply ask a friend back home to call them and impersonate me to make them think that I am back in the UK.. can anyone see any potential problems with this?

Thanks for any help anyone can give me!

DUTR

All I can see as a way round it is to wait until you return, it's not as if you are going to be out there forever is it?

macman

How are you going to prove where you are even when you do return to the UK?
Surely they will just send a cheque to your registered home address-or ask them to do a BACS transfer to your account.
What they probably won't do is make the cheque out to your wife, or send it to an unregistered address.

Uncle_Junior

Thanks for your thoughts guys. To the first reply, I will be back in England in a few months but I'd just prefer to have the money banked before then, also the value of the iPhone 4 will drop when the iPhone 5 comes out so I'm worried they'll want to give me less money than they will at the moment.

So nobody can see any problems with getting a friend to call from the UK and say he's me (providing I give him all the passwords and reference numbers that they have given me)? It just seemed like too easy a way around the problem, thought I must have been missing something!